Away from Home
by lionesseyes13
Summary: Far away from home, Mark Wells tries to forge a family with his teammates, but that's hard to do when he believes that the only one who wants him on the team is himself. A friendship story set during the European tour rated T for hockey player language.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note: **Everything in this story is as accurate as my research and imagination could make it. To avoid plot spoilers, I'll save a more detailed account of fact and fiction for the author's note in the last chapter, but if readers have any questions on the veracity of anything in this fanfic, they can shoot me a review or a PM, and I'll get back to them with a response as quickly as my crazy schedule permits.

The quotes from hockey players and coaches are all chosen because they transcend time period in capturing a locker room and team culture although some of the quotations used in this fic were not uttered until after this story is set. On that final note, sit back and enjoy the story…

In Each Stick

"_I only have one goal in each stick."—__**Petr Klima explaining his custom of breaking his sticks after scoring**_

It was a few minutes before morning practice in Helsinki, Finland, was scheduled to start, which meant it had to be nighttime back home in St. Claire Shores, Michigan. What time precisely Mark Wells wasn't going to calculate, since that would only make him feel further dislocated from everyone—except Ken Morrow—who believed in him as a person and a hockey player.

All over the ice, his teammates performed whatever various tasks prepared them most effectively for the impending practice. Dotting the faceoff circles, knots of players stretched and speculated on the drills Herb was likely to subject them to that morning. Along the boards, a line of boys inspected the tape on their sticks, fiddled with the eternally chafing straps snapped beneath their chins, and adjusted their gloves. At the far end of the ice from where Mark stood, a stream of players cycled around the goalposts, passing pucks to one another or firing them into the mesh of the net.

Shaking his head, Mark observed inwardly how weird it was for him to be lonely in a rink that reverberated with teasing and laughter. As he often did when he felt vulnerable, he decided to get his blood pumping and his adrenaline spiking with a competition. Once he voluntarily pitted himself against the rest of the world, it didn't sting like vinegar applied to a gaping wound to be rejected by everybody.

"Let's have a goal celebration contest," he announced, nudging Ken, who was skating alongside him, in the ribs. "We take turns putting the puck in the net, and every time it goes in, whoever shot it has to break into the disco or some crazy crap like that. Whoever has the more insane celebration wins. You go first now."

"All right." Ken yanked his stick back to wind up for one of his comically slow but remarkably accurate slapshots.

"Shit, Kenny." Mark chortled as he monitored the puck's glacial progression into the empty net. "Grandmothers who are too senile to remember where the grocery store is buy milk faster than that."

"Don't spoil my moment with your jealousy." Ken watched as the puck finally found its destination, and then he sped around the net, knelt, and pretended to launch an invisible arrow from an equally immaterial bow toward the rafters. "The goal light is flashing for me!"

"Pathetic performance. You must have had cold feet in those skates." Rolling his eyes as Ken ceased his antics, Mark fired a considerably faster wrist shot that steamed in the net. Holding his stick like a gun directed at the vacant bleachers, he took a victory lap around the goalposts, calling, "I'm the champion!"

"Not so fast. I can easily one-up that." Ken wound up for another ridiculously slow slapshot that reached its target at a pace of which a snail would be ashamed. Then, wearing an exaggeratedly smug expression as if he had just potted the most gorgeous goal in all of hockey history, he mounted his stick and charged toward center ice with his stick jammed between his legs like a witch's broom. As he skated back toward Mark with the stick removed from between his thighs, Ken asked, "Wasn't that some amazing witchcraft?"

"The only witchcraft is in my shooting skills," answered Mark in his most dismissive tone, launching a backhanded shot that sailed into the net. Deciding to take advantage of the opportunity to go completely wild in every way before the regimented drills of practice began, he whirled and glided back to the blueline. There he flopped dramatically onto the ice and allowed his momentum to carry him skidding across neutral ice, chirping, "Help me! I've fallen and I can't get up."

"On your feet, Wells," barked a harsh voice Mark had no trouble recognizing, but he reflexively craned his neck to look at Herb as he stepped onto the rink anyway. "We don't have time to waste with you messing around like the idiot you are during practice. If you aren't going to work, you can get your ass back into the locker room and pack for your trip home. I'm serious even if you aren't. Get that through the concrete block you're using as a heck this instant."

Biting his tongue with enough force to draw blood over a scathing retort about what orifice from which Herb should consider removing his own head, Mark pushed himself to his feet, feeling suddenly clumsy and confused where a minute ago he had felt agile and smooth in every sense of the word. Not that such a transformation should have come as a shock to him, of course, because it was one that the mere presence of Herb and his icy glower routinely provoked.

His cheeks burning like embers from an unbanked fire with embarrassment, Mark joined his teammates in a semicircle along the boards, listening to drill Herb outlined with accompanying flicks of his marker on the glass.

The strategy that Herb mapped out could probably have been explained in Mandarin and Mark would have comprehended it as well, but he didn't want to bring further condemnation crashing down on his eardrums, so he did not raise a hand when Herb concluded his lecture with the following sharp question: "Are we clear about what we'll be doing?"

"Clear as mud in a fucking swamp," muttered Mark to Ken, whose mouth quirked into a sickle smile, satisfying his need to be snarky in the face of bafflement.

Ten minutes later, though, as he battled with Neal Broten along the boards for the puck in an internal tangle of bemusement about what he was supposed to next and if he was even doing the right thing during the present nonetheless in the uncertain future, he wished that he had sacrificed his pride by asking Herb what in the name of all the fickle hockey gods they were intended to do in this latest of Herb's bewildering training techniques.

He was so frustrated and flustered that he somehow lost control of his stick. Eyes wide as coins, he heard the stick—acting of its own accord—smashing into Neal's jaw. The resultant crack turned Mark into a numb statue as a howling Neal attempted rather ineffectually to cradle a bruising jaw and wipe the blood from a split lip with a glove simultaneously. He wanted to apologize or offer to fetch Neal a towel from the bench, but he couldn't remember the words necessary to express even these basic notions, and his mouth, dry as sawdust, wouldn't have permitted him to choke out these phrases anyhow.

"Are you okay, buddy?" asked Eric Strobel, skating over to cup Neal's chin as delicately as he could with gloves on.

"Yeah, you bet." Neal gave a grin that appeared more like a grimace. "I never really cared for my lips, you know. I was hoping to be able to get another set one of these days."

"Oh, well done, Wells," put in Rob McClanahan, who had arrived at the scene less than a second behind Eric and was now studying Mark as if he were some hideous bug under a microscope awaiting classification—_horriblus insectus,_ male. Although they had only been acquainted for only a handful of weeks, Mark already realized that Rob was a fumer who would never tell you explicitly that he was mad. You just had to guess by the tautness of his cheekbones, the steely slits of his eyes, and the enunciated sighs that could be as belittling as his contemptuous commentary. Rob seemed to be in that angry mode right now, which was guaranteed to make what was already shaping into a terrible day even more nightmarish. "You've proven that you can be a tough guy so long as you're whaling into those younger than you. You must be _so _proud. Would you like a shiny trophy so you can boast to all your neighbors about how brave you are, beating up on those littler than you, huh?"

Gritting his teeth, Mark thought that at the best of times, Rob had more than his fair share of upper-crust hauteur, which Mark was learning was something that couldn't be bought but was instead taught from a childhood spent in a gated community, exclusive country clubs, fancy restaurants, and posh resorts, and this was most definitely closer to the worst of times than the best.

"Stuff a sock in it, McClanahan," snarled Mark, his hands clenching into fists as he imagined punching out a row of Rob's teeth. "It was a fucking accident, you jackass, as you would see I you removed that stick you have shoved up your butt."

"You're supposed to maintain control of your stick at all times unless it's a wind-up or follow-through from a shot on goal, which your hit on Neal wasn't, for the record." Rob's disdainful glare made it plain that, as little as he had ever anticipated from Mark, he had at least expected more than this, but that shouldn't have been a surprise. Rob was so conscientious about hockey—and indeed everything else in the universe-that he probably never did anything unintentional with his stick and couldn't fathom anyone else having such a lapse. That's why Mark's private nickname for him was He-Who-Could-Achieve-Anything-by-Sheer-Force-of-Will. That's why his most frequent and considerably less annoying linemate was Mark Johnson, also known as He-Who-Could-Do-No-Wrong. "Since you drew blood with that rowdy stick of yours, it would be a four minute penalty, which you wouldn't be the one to have kill, so I guess that's why this whole affair is not sweat off your brow."

Skating over from the bench with a cloth, Bill Baker chimed in, "All this arguing isn't doing anyone any good."

Before Mark or Rob could respond, Bill thrust the towel into Neal's grasp, ordering, "Hold this to your lips and put gentle pressure on it, Neal. That'll staunch the bleeding in a couple of minutes at most."

"How unhygienic." Mouth thinning, Rob jerked his chin at the cloth Neal was pressing against his bloody lips. "That's one of the towels we use to wipe sweat off our foreheads. Do you even understand what germs are, Dr. Baker?"

"It hasn't been used yet today." Bill shrugged. "Chill out before you give yourself a coronary."

"That doesn't mean anything." All stubbornness, Rob shook his head. "That towel probably hasn't been washed since it was first manufactured in about the sixteenth century."

"Don't indulge in hyperbole," countered Bill. "Be reasonable, Robbie. The first textile mills weren't even created until the Industrial Revolution began in the later part of the eighteenth century."

Rob opened his mouth to snap back, but was cut off before he could start to speak by the arrival of Coach Patrick, who asked, "What's going on here, boys?"

"Wells high-sticked Neal right in the jaw." Rob snatched the cloth from Neal's hand and waved it in Coach Patrick's face. "Look at all that blood, Coach."

"It was an accident," ground out Mark, shooting Rob a withering glare that he hoped stated more eloquently than words that evisceration was too pleasant a fate for a liar and a snitch.

"If it was an accident, then I'm very much mistaken." Rob's frigid manner provided an implicit declaration that he perceived himself as seldom being wrong and immensely doubted that this was one of those few occasions.

"That's extremely likely to be the case because you weren't here to see what actually happened before passing judgment," Mark volleyed back, thinking that two could engage in this verbal sparring match.

"Neal." Seemingly ignoring the war of wits between Mark and Rob, Coach Patrick riveted his gaze on the truly injured party. "That jaw appears as if it could swell. Do you want to go into the locker room and get an ice pack from Doc?"

"Nah, Coach. I've heard that the ladies find a tough guy simply irresistible." Neal's playful spirit glimmered through his eyes. "I'm going to rock the ruggedly handsome look for their benefit for a week or two."

"Fine. Don't hesitate to get an ice pack if you change your mind, though." Coach Patrick shifted his focus to first Mark and then Rob. "Now, if Mark claims that his stick hitting Neal was unintentional, we have to believe him in the absence of any incredibly convincing evidence on the contrary. I trust that verdict will be satisfactory to everyone."

"After such a thorough investigation into the suspicious circumstances surrounding Neal's injury, I don't see how anybody could be less than satisfied." The sardonic twist to Rob's expression made it obvious that he thought that it was more likely that Mark had gotten away with an awful, blatant cheapshot than that he was as much a hapless victim of his stick as Neal was.

Mark was well aware that this was a boil that Rob would need to lance after practice or else it would fester, so he was not astonished when during the bus ride to Helsinki station to catch a train that would transport them north to Oulu, Rob slipped into the aisle seat next to him that had just been vacated by Ken rising to visit the bathroom.

On a whole, Mark didn't anticipate anything remotely amicable emerging from this encounter. After all, he was by now firmly convinced that Minnesota Nice was just another term for passive-aggressive and that all Minnesota natives were more wary of than friendly to outsiders. Of the Minnesotan xenophobes clotting the Olympic team, Rob, probably nervous that anyone outside his sheltered neighborhood was a closet serial killer, was the most egregious offender, as far as Mark was concerned. On this particular occasion, Rob didn't fail to live up to form.

Without preamble, because he wasn't the type to waste a second on small talk when he had an important point to make, Rob remarked tersely, "You made a mistake bigger than the Grand Canyon at practice today, you know."

"Really?" Mark arched a coldly inquisitive eyebrow, determined to prove how utterly unfazed he was by any potential criticism Rob McClanahan's piquant tongue could provide free of charge.

"Yep." Hard eyes locked on Mark's, Rob offered a brief nod. "Listen, wanting to show that you're a tough guy is all fair and square, since we're all doing whatever the hell we have to do to make this team, but targeting Neal Broten for your cheapshot was about as brilliant an idea as going skydiving without a parachute. In case it's slipped your notice as so many things have, Neal's a pet of Herb's. If he catches you trying to make mincemeat of Neal, he'll torture you so much that you'll be begging on your knees to be boiled alive and devoured by cannibals."

"You've rode the Tilt-a-Whirl too long if this is the sort of vomit you're spewing," hissed Mark, spine stiffening and body temperature rocketing from arctic enough to freeze the blood coursing through his veins to hot enough to cook an egg just like the sidewalls during the dog days of August when it was ninety-two degrees in the shade. Sweat pooled on his forehead and ran in rivulets down his cheeks. As he swiped the salty secretions away with the cuff of his shirt, he blamed the moisture coating his face on the dubiously reliable climate control system in the bus. "I already explained that the high-stick on Neal was an accident. If Neal has no trouble believing that, I don't see why you're having such a difficult time accepting that truth, unless the rumors about your peanut-sized brain are grounded in reality."

"Neal is far too innocent to contemplate nonetheless comprehend deliberate malice." Rob's clenching jaw made every syllable strident. "Not all of his friends—and he's got way more of them than just Herb, so you're aware-are that naïve. Keep control of your stick around him, or else you might discover that you're the tragic victim of some unfortunate and totally not suspicious accident befalling you at practice."

"Are you threatening me?" growled Mark, already envisioning the damage that his stick could inflict on Rob if the other forward dared to assault him on ice. It would be good to hit someone who deserved it and whom he wanted to hurt.

"On the contrary, I'm just giving you some friendly advice, since I'm sure we're all friends here now." Flashing a smile that didn't even approach his eyes and was chillingly devoid of any genuine warmth, Rob rose as Ken exited the bathroom at the rear of the bus. "Ah, Kenny materializes. I'll leave you to the auspices of his charming company and hope that your life won't be a desert drear without the oasis of my scintillating conversation. Au revoir."

"What a shitty asshole," Mark grunted to Ken as his friend settled next to him, glowering at Rob's back as he returned to the seat beside Steve Christoff and took out _Wuthering Heights_.

"Clearly, I'm missing a page with a crucial plot point in this conflict." Ken's gaze flickered to rest on Rob and then fixed on Mark once again. "What happened, or is it too nosy of me to ask?"

"Between friends, there's no such thing as too nosy." Desperate to escape the heat thickening the air in the bus, Mark rested his clammy forehead against the cool glass of his window. "Anyway, McClanahan was just proving that if he were half as smart as he thinks he is, he'd be twice as clever as he really is. Seriously, he's dimmer than a burned out lightbulb. That's why he's convinced that my unintentional high-stick on Neal was a cheapshot and worth threatening me with suspicious accidents of my own if any more mistakes happen."

"Don't worry." Ken clapped Mark's shoulder. "If he tries to beat up on you, I'll stand up for you, and I'm much bigger than he is."

"McClanahan is the least person on Earth I'm afraid of," scoffed Mark, rolling his eyes. "He's so weak that he probably can't even whip cream."

"In our dealings with him, I guess we've both got to keep in mind as much as possible that from his perspective he's just protecting his teammate," Ken commented already attempting to minimize potential confrontations before they could crop up by striving to view events from their opponent's position. No matter how horrifyingly rude Rob acted, Ken would behave as the best of Good Samaritans, because he expected himself to always be civil regardless of circumstances. "I'm sure once you've been his teammate for longer and earned his loyalty, you'll appreciate his defensiveness a ton more."

"Whatever you say." Mark scraped at his cuticles. "Of course, it remains to be seen how much longer I'm teammate, anyhow, before I'm crossed off the roster."

"Before he's crossed off the roster, you mean," corrected Ken, elbowing Mark in the stomach. "Don't go all defeatist on me now, okay? That's never been your style, and it doesn't suit you."

"I'm a realist, not a defeatist." Shaking his head, Mark thought he was astute enough to know which way the wind was blowing when a monsoon was raging around him. "I'm used to having to prove myself to coaches since I'm so small because I've been doing that ever since I laced up skates all the way through college. I truly believe that I could be as dynamic a center as Pavelich, Broten, and maybe even Johnsn if Herb gave me a shot. I'm just not crazy enough to think that herb's going to give me that chance at the rate things are progressing. That's life, or death, really, given the context of my fate on this team."

"You have plenty of time to show Herb that you're worth your weight in gold." Ken ruffled Mark's sweaty hair. "Cheer up. I mean, McClanahan probably hasn't impressed Herb enough to be guaranteed a spot on the roster either by now. Everything is still in flux."

"Wake the fuck up, Kenny. The alarm is blaring, and the coffee is brewing." Vexed by his friend's obtuseness, Mark clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "McClanahan is about as much a lock for the team as anyone can be. I hate his guts, but there's no denying he's a clever and quick player, and if there's two things in the world Herb doesn't despise, they're swift and smart. Besides, McClanahan's already building an on ice chemistry nobody else has with Johnson, so, even if he were the jackpot combination of stupid and slow, he'd have decent odds of making the roster as the useless appendage of a winger that in one of the greater unresolved mysteries of the universe jells better than anyone else with the indispensable star center."

"Well, then you'd better learn how to get along with him," insisted Ken, earnest as a terrier, "because apparently you're both going to be teammates in Lake Placid."

"I'd rather be teammates with the maggots on a decomposing corpse." Mark's lips curved into a sneer.

"Why can't you just be _nice_?" Ken sighed, and, though Mark snorted, a message sank in with him all the same: that being nice was the ideal, the one place where people didn't get so loud or so quiet they could scar you for life. If you could just be nice, then you wouldn't have to worry about injuries, arguments, or suspicions at all, but being nice, at least for Mark, wasn't as easy as it sounded, especially when the rest of the planet was determined to be so callous and cruel.


	2. Chapter 2

"_I usually call the new guy and let him know where I like to sit on the bus, tell him ways that he can stay out of my way, make sure he knows not to touch any of my stuff."—__**Brendan Shanahan**_

A Place to Rest

"Here we are." Ken inserted his key into the lock and pulled open the steel door of what had probably once been a storage closet but was now officially referred to on the train's registry as Cabin 713 before bowing, in his best imitation of a butler, his roommates, Mark and Jimmy, inside. "Our suite, sirs."

"I prefer gentlemen, actually, since it flows off the tongue better." Mark slipped inside the cabin and wasn't astonished to discover that all the tiny pieces of furniture were so jammed up against each other the he felt cramped even when he wasn't trying to move. That was the Europe of his experience, though. On this continent, everything from the portions served at restaurants to the rooms and furniture seemed to have shrunken a size or two like the Grinch's heart, and he didn't appreciate even if he was a midget by hockey standards. After all, that insulting fact wasn't one which he wanted to be reminded of constantly by his environment. It was awful enough to have coaches harping on about it as if it were something he could change if they shouted loudly and nagged incessantly enough. Throwing his duffel bag on the bottom of the three bunks—more like planks—jutting from the wall, he added, "Oh, and I think a more accurate name for our suite would be dumping ground."

"So, it's not the French Riviera." Flashing a wry grin, Ken tossed his duffel next to Mark's. "Can you really hold that against a place?"

"Yes." Mark wrinkled his nose, as he continued to scrutinize the bunks and recognized that, in addition to being narrower than the average bed, they had won the double jackpot of by being shorter-probably so short that Ken's legs from the kneecaps down would be hanging off the mattress. "Especially since that's not this room's only failing by a long shot."

"There are worse places—like Charlestown." Jim's blue eyes glittered with what Mark thought was amusement, but he couldn't be certain, because you could never be sure with the temperamental Boston boys. While a Minnesotan could offer you a smile that didn't reach the eyes while wishing you a super day in a regional expression that actually translated into them advising you to freeze your privates off in a blizzard, the Boston boys could laugh at your jokes one minute and hold a weapon under your throat the next. Apparently, Michigan was the only place on the planet inhabited by sane people like him and Kenny. The rest of the world was just one giant funny farm for nutters. "Just don't tell OC I said that."

"I'm starving," Mark muttered, as Jim piled his duffel beside Ken's. "Let's go see if we can find the dining car before I die of hunger."

"I think you might just be lucky enough to live," replied Ken, while they drifted out of the cabin and yanked the door closed after them. "I saw a Finnish and English sign in the corridor that said it was in the second car."

"Only five more cars to go, then." Mark grunted. "I'll have no muscles on my skin and bones when we get there.'

"Don't be a grump." Ken nudged Mark's now rumbling stomach. "Just think of this as another traveling experience to help you learn about yourself."

"Humph." Unappeased, Mark snorted. If, as Ken claimed, the whole point of travel was to learn about oneself, Mark's European tour was a dazzling success so far, because he had learned all sorts of things. He had learned that being on an Olympic team did not necessarily bring all happiness with it, especially if one's head coach and fellow players obviously viewed you as excess baggage. He had learned that his body was entirely too used to the comfortable and familiar food served at Bowling Green's dining hall, and that Europe was larger than it looked on a globe and loaded with foreigners—who saw him as the outsider-who willingly ate the most disgusting dishes imaginable. "One lesson this experience has already taught me is that the hungrier I am, the shorter my temper is. My stomach and temper sizes are clearly linked."

Mark's stomach was tight and aching with hunger by the time they arrived in the dining car. As the smells of fish and cabbage—two staples of the Finnish diet—deluged their nostrils, they walked down the aisle between wooden tables and benches crowded with teammates and strangers alike until they reached a counter where stews in cardboard cups and casseroles in plastic boxes were available for purchase along with beer and assorted juices.

While Mark glowered at the dinner options because none appeared sufficiently substantial to fill his empty stomach, Jim grabbed a beer and a cup of split pea soup labeled hernekeitto, which he paid for at the register, before vanishing to join Pav, who was sitting along at a booth, staring out the window at the star-strewn indigo sky surrounding the train.

Ken had already decided on a beer and lokikeitto—a salmon, leek, and potato stew garnished with dill—and Mark didn't want to hold up his friend or the process of eating any longer, so he selected a beer and a cup of stew at random. After handing their money to the cashier and receiving plastic spoons and a stack of paper napkins in exchange, Mark and Ken scanned the car for a spot to sit.

They did not have to look long, for a second later, an arm waved from a packed table three rows away from them, and Phil Verchota bellowed with enough volume to shatter porcelain in Paris, "Over here, guys! We've got plenty of room for two more."

This final statement was revealed to be something of a falsehood when Mark and Ken joined the table. As Mark wedged himself into the booth facing backward as the train raced forward, he found himself jammed against Dave Silk, who was in turn squeezed up against Eric Strobel, who was pressed up against Rob McClanahan, whose face was smashed up against the window pane.

Rather vindictively hoping that rob was the least comfortable person on the planet, Mark realized that this was unlikely to be the case, since their teammates on the opposite bench were packed more tightly together than sardines in a can. Ken, hanging half out of the booth, was leaning against Phil, who was pushing into Bill, who was jammed against OC, who was causing Steve Christoff to be squashed against the window like a praying mantis.

"If you ask one more person to sit with us, I'll knock out all of your teeth." Silky, displaying his inimitable knack for making anyone feel as welcome as the measles, tried to shake an admonishing fist at Phil but found his range of motion too restricted by the confining circumstances, so he took a swing from his beer bottle instead. "It's getting so cramped around here that a dude can hardly breathe."

"Yeah," put in Rob, slicing his lihapullat—which was basically meatballs soaked in a creamy sauce called kermaviili—into precise pieces, "our table has definitely reached carrying capacity at this point."

"I think the fire warden would say we've exceeded it." Steve scowled as he dug into a beef, pork, and lamb hot pot referred to by the Finns as karjalanpaisti. "If there's an emergency, we're all more likely to trip over each other than make it out alive."

"Not really." Phil shook his head as he munched on a forkful of minced meat and cabbage casserole called kaalilaatikkdo. "It's probably only you and Mac who would be killed, and, given how annoying you both are, it might be an exaggeration to speak of that as a tragic loss."

"Screw you." Steve speared a slab of lamb. "My mom would be absolutely crushed if I croaked, I assure you."

"I'll do my best to console her in the midst of her devastation." Phil assumed an expression that was mocking in its seriousness. "As I hand her a Kleenex over your coffin, I'll be sure to tell her that you didn't want it to end the way it did."

"That's no comfort to a grieving mother." This time, Steve skewered a chunk of pork. "You have all the sympathy of an ax murderer."

"Maybe you're right." Phil snickered. "Perhaps it would be more compassionate of me to assure her that you always dreamed of dying in a terrible train accident. I could tell Mac's mom the same good news."

"What good news would that be exactly?" Rob rolled his eyes. "That we're dumber than logs and wanted to die in a nightmarish fashion? Oh, yeah, that's totally what any mourning mother wants to hear about her dearly departed son."

"Exactly." Phil gave a cheery nod. "Your poor mothers will be able to overcome their grief by reminding themselves that their sons furthered natural selection by dying before they could reproduce."

"Our moms aren't Social Darwinists." Rob's tone was frosty enough to fog the windowpane he was wedged against. "I doubt they'd be consoled."

Before Phil could counter this, Mark, who until that point had been busy guzzling half his beer, commented as he took a bite of his stew for the first time, "This tastes a little like my beer. Weird."

"Of course it does." Silky's eyes cut like scissors. "That's merimiespato. In addition to the beef, potatoes, and onions, there's a healthy serving of beer in there. You're probably going to smell like a wino for the rest of the night."

"You're not one to talk about stinking, Silky." OC jerked his fork, which was laden with a mashed turnip casserole called lanttulaatikko, across the table at Silky in an accusing gesture. "That's the garlic stew you've got there. All night, your breath is going to raise such a stench that even Dracula would cower."

"Obviously, he'd cringe." Silky stuck out his tongue and flooded the whole booth with the overwhelming odor of garlic. "All vampires are allergic to garlic, you know."

"Of course I do." OC's lips split into a cocky grin. "That's a legend as old as King Arthur. Give me some real news or shut the hell up, Silky."

"I've got some news even if Silky doesn't." Bill whipped out a glossy _People _and flipped to a random article. "This was the only American magazine I could find at the counter, but I'm positive it will contain all the important updates from the States. I mean, look here, the reigning Miss Louisiana just announced her menu for her upcoming wedding next May."

"Simply charming." Phil took a sip of his beer. "What's on the menu for the nuptials, huh, Bill?"

"For the appetizer, there's the breadcrumb-coated fried macaroni and cheese balls drizzled in vodka sauce," replied Bill.

"Nauseating." Rob's nose wrinkled in revulsion, and Mark hated to admit, even to himself, that he personally agreed with the insufferable Rob McClanahan in this assessment, although, like a broken clock, Rob was probably bound to be right twice a day. "As if macaroni and cheese isn't loaded with enough fat to make a pig's arteries clog, Miss Louisiana had to make it even unhealthier by frying it and drenching it in a creamy sauce."

"She's going to pull that timeless post-nuptial trick of blowing up like a blimp on her unfortunate husband." OC nibbled sagely on his mashed turnip casserole. "For their honeymoon, she'll be thin as a twig. Then by the end of their first month of marriage, she'll be plump as a Thanksgiving turkey. In honor of their first Christmas as man and wife, she'll be larger than a beached humpback whale and twice as prone to moping. What a conniving bitch."

"People from Lousiana aren't renowned for their classiness or their intellect, so I suppose if there's anything fitting for them to eat, it's fried macaroni and cheese balls." Rob's mouth twisted with a disdain that probably meant that his family would have been ashamed to serve such an unsophisticated menu at a backyard barbecue. "Of course, we have to spare Miss Louisiana some credit here. She at least had the taste to attempt to act as if she had some by dribbling sauce all over those balls."

"Sure, and if she were Miss Minnesota, she wouldn't be able to locate the damn balls without a map," taunted OC, how whole face a gigantic smirk.

"You're just jealous of Miss Minnesota's relative brilliance, OC," Rob retorted, "because if she were Miss Massachusetts, she wouldn't be able to find the fucking map."

"Zip it, Robbie." Phil interrupted the budding argument. "If you don't listen to Miss Louisiana's menu, how will you be able to steal ideas for your own wedding?"

"Her menu is more likely to give me an idea of what _not _to do than what to do," scoffed Rob. "I'd love to hear what could possibly be more disgusting than fried macaroni and cheese balls, though. Go on, Bill. I can't wait to learn how Miss Louisiana will outdo herself with the entrée."

"The main course is fried chicken and waffles in honey bourbon sauce," continued Bill, reading from the tabloid and taking a bite of his kalakukko, a fish pie baked in a thick rye crust, at the same time.

"Sounds like a hangover food," muttered Silky.

"What a gross mixture of breakfast and dinner foods." Rob snorted. "I'd barf if I had to look at all that junk on the same plate, nonetheless eat it."

"You could try to broaden your palate," chimed in Ken, swallowing a spoonful of his salmon stew. "Then you wouldn't be so sickened by everyday foods like chicken or waffles."

"The _or _isn't where my problem is," answered Rob, wiping his fingers on his napkin. "My issue lies with the _and_—as in both chicken _and _waffles served on the same plate as if they belonged together like bacon and eggs. Besides, if I ate chicken and waffles as one dish, my stomach would broaden long before my palate did."

"Stop being ignorant and show more sensitivity to diversity, Robbie." Bill closed the magazine with a snap. "Chicken and waffles is a common Creole dish like banana foster, which, by the way, is the dessert at Miss Louisiana's wedding."

"Thank God I'm not Creole then." Rob's jaw tightened. "My Scottish culture doesn't demand that I partake of the outlandish food that is chicken and waffles."

"Yep, you can just stick to haggis." Bill's lips thinned. "Sheep gut pudding sounds much more appetizing than chicken and waffles."

"Only on Hogmanay," riposted Rob, dark eyes as challenging as an alpha wolf's. "You should be aware, Mr. Diversity, that it's only traditional for Scots to consume the delicacy that is haggis on Hogmanay."

After that, the lulling motion of the train surging along the track combined with the intoxicating impact of the alcohol in his beer and stew prompted Mark to descend into something of a stupor. Staring out the window, he began to understand why Pav had seemed so enraptured by the blackness, which wasn't really black at all, but a swirling kaleidoscope of browns, purples, and blues made all the more mesmerizing by the fact that he had never noticed these enticing hues of night before…

"Are you ready to go back to our cabin?" asked Ken, reaching across the table to tap Mark on the elbow.

Jolted back to reality, Mark mumbled an assent, and the two of them rose to return to their cabin. Mark wasn't sure if it was the exhaustion that had seeped into his bones, the alcohol that was soaking into his bladder and liver, or the uneven lurching of the train beneath his sneakers, but he found himself relying on Ken's broad shoulder for support on much of their journey back to their room.

"Sorry," he muttered as they came to their destination, wondering how his pride could ever let him thank a friend who carried him without complaint when he felt so heavy.

"Don't mention it." Ken flashed a smile as he slipped the key in the lock and yanked their door open. "You're a complete lightweight."

"I felt heavy as a sack of bricks, though," grunted Mark, wishing for probably the millionth time that he had been born tall like Ken instead of stocky like a barrel.

As Ken shut the door behind them, Mark crossed over to the bunks that were so narrow a jolt of the train would probably send any sleeper plummeting onto the floor, he scowled as he saw Jim climbing toward the top bunk, which was the only one with a protective railing.

"You put your bag on the bottom bunk." Not wanting to spend a night picking himself up off the ground, Mark grabbed Jim's ankle and tugged on it. "That means you claimed it, so you have to sleep on it, Craig."

"We all put our bags on the bottom bunk." Jim battled to extricate his leg from Mark's grasp as Mark clasped the ankle all the more resolutely at this rebellious behavior. "That means none of us claimed it, genius."

"I claim the top bunk. Come back down to Earth." With a sharp yank that exerted almost all of his remaining energy, Mark managed to pull Jim down to the floor, so they both hit the ground in a tangle of limbs.

In the jagged mountain of arms and legs, Mark could smell the alcohol on Jim's breath, and he figured that Jim had probably had a few beers during his dinner with Pav. After all, Pav was such a stone that when eating with him the only thing to do was drink yourself under the table before you perished of extreme boredom.

"Don't do this." Ken snatched at Mark's arm. "Where you sleep isn't worth fighting over."

"Would you lay off the bone-crushing grip, huh?" snarled Mark, thrashing about like an eel in a desperate attempt to escape Ken's pincer hold on his arm. "As impossible as it might seem to someone with your peanut brain, I might need that arm again someday."

"This isn't my bone-crushing grip." Ken gave Mark's arm a meaningful jerk. "It's my don't-do-anything-stupid grip. We'll progress to bone-crushing in a couple of seconds if necessary."

"Screw yourself with your hockey stick," hissed Mark, launching a vicious left hook at Ken and a kick at Jim simultaneously.

Dodging the blow, Ken released Mark as a hammering on the wall to their right echoed throughout the cabin, and Rob's voice beat against their eardrums as a muffled shout, "You guys know that these walls aren't fucking soundproof, right?"

As he aimed a retaliatory swat at Mark's leg, Jim barked, "If we didn't before, we do now, thanks, McClanahan."

While Mark and Jim unleashed barrages of slaps and punches upon one another and Ken waded amongst the melee trying to pull apart the two combatants in the fray, OC's voice sang out from the cabin to their left, "What's that fracas? Are you boys engaging in hot monkey sex over there?"

"We could buy you guys all sorts of chains and whips as props so it would be just as if you were in a real circus," crowed Silky from the same adjacent cabin as OC.

His ire rising, Mark pounded his fists all the more feverishly against Jim's body, as a drumming hit their door followed a second later by Steve Christoff bellowing, "Shut the hell up! Some of us are trying to sleep, damn it!"

"I'll handle this mess now, Steve." Coach Patrick's voice sounded from the other side of the door. "Go back to bed."

As Steve presumably returned to his own cabin to comply with this command, there came another firm knock on their door as Coach Patrick ordered, "Open up, boys."

When Ken stepped over his two roommates, who had abruptly ceased their struggles against each other, and slid the door open to admit Coach Patrick, Mark swallowed, knowing that if he was blamed for this brawl, he would entirely fall from grace on this hockey team, assuming, of course, that he could fall from a state of grace he had probably never been in as far as Herb was concerned. More likely, in Herb's eyes, he would topple from the eighth circle of hell to the ninth, but at least from there he couldn't slip any lower. Even in hell, there were blessings only the damned could appreciate, and another one of those dubious blessings was probably that the fire that raged within his chest made the inferno of eternal hellfire seem like a tame campfire for roasting marshmallows by comparison.

"What's this fight about, boys?" Coach Patrick glanced heavenward, as though praying for the patience to deal with wayward players.

"We couldn't come to an agreement about who should take the top bunk, Coach," explained Ken, taking responsibility for the brawl as if he had instigated it instead of done everything in his power to end it.

"I see." Coach Patrick pinched the bridge of his nose. "Jim, you take the top bunk. Ken, you'll sleep on the middle one, and, Mark, I want you on the bottom one. I trust you will all be comfortable with this arrangement."

"No, I won't be comfortable." Trembling as he combated the urge to punch Coach Patrick squarely in the jaw, Mark folded his arms across his chest. "I won't be comfortable unless I get to sleep on the top bunk."

"You can sleep on the top bunk next time." Coach Patrick arched an eyebrow. "How about that? That sounds reasonable and fair, doesn't it?"

"No, it doesn't." Mark gritted his teeth, thinking with all the bitterness of vinegar that was the worst thing about Coach Patrick. There was always a How-About-This with him, some deal with the Devil that he was always able to manufacture and sell that, while not markedly different from the original proposition, at least sounded preferable. Before Coach Patrick entered the cabin, it had been Mark's prerogative to refuse to sleep on the bottom bunk; now, doing so would make him appear unjust and irrational.

"It's because I'm short, isn't it?" Mark hurled the three duffel bags of the bottom bunk and took a sick pleasure in the racket of them slamming against the opposite wall in rapid succession of one another. "You think that it would be too inconvenient for me to climb up to the top bunk, don't you?"

"Your height is not a problem, but your attitude is unacceptable." Coach Patrick's tone and gaze were frigid as icicles. "Either sleep on the floor or on the bottom bunk, whichever you prefer, but I don't want to hear about you bothering anyone else on this team until at least the morning. Are we clear, Wellsy?"

"As crystal," replied Mark, thinking with resentment as poisonous as arsenic that he could see right through every coach's vendetta against short athletes. Height discrimination was real no matter what tall people argued on the contrary. Mark had seen too many dismissive looks and heard too many derisive snorts from coaches based on his size alone not to have abundant proof of that nasty fact.

As Coach Patrick left, closing the door in his wake, Mark collapsed on the bottom bunk that would now be his for the duration of the train trip. Without ever changing into his pajamas, he nestled under the cheap blanket and buried his head in the scratchy pillowcase, trying to calm his mind and body, but that was difficult to do with his heart still thudding from the brawl.

Even when his adrenaline stopped racing through his veins, he couldn't fall asleep although his roommates had switched off the lights, so everything was dark, because now that the endorphins were no longer spiking within him, he could feel the bruises swelling on his chest, his arms, and his cheeks. If he was knocked into the boards tomorrow, he'd probably ache for a week, but he wouldn't be able to flinch, since that would just be another black mark against him in the mental Rolodex Herb kept of such lapses, filing them away for later consideration when determining whom to cut from the team.

His head was throbbing as if he had a hangover, and he wished he had a handful of Excedrin, his default medication for such an affliction. Since he didn't, he rolled out of bed, deciding that if he couldn't sleep, he could at least enjoy the perk of insomnia which was being able to drink coffee while everyone else was wrapped in the cocoon of slumber. Maybe the caffeine would be just as rejuvenating as a night's rest, he told himself as he exited the cabin and walked down to the dining car, which was now stocked with the pastries and porridges characteristic of a Finnish breakfast.

Electing to be utterly decadent and self-indulgent, Mark loaded a paper plate with an omenalortsy, which was a pastry filled with stewed apples, and a mustikkapulla, which was a sweet bun rolled around blueberries. Then he poured himself a cup of coffee from the carafe over the brewer and strode over to the counter, where he paid for his midnight snack while ignoring the silent judgment in the ocean eyes of the blonde woman working the register during the red eye shift.

Trying not to recall how crowded with conversation and laughter this car had been in the not-too-distant past, he slid into a booth and took a sip of his coffee. The caffeine dominated his mouth like a bittersweet memory, making his saliva squirt in mingled pleasure and misery. Drinking coffee alone in the dead of night was probably the very definition of what it meant to be a wretched creature, but when you couldn't sleep, you had to keep yourself awake somehow, and there was no better way of doing that than drinking coffee. He had read somewhere that caffeine could become addictive like alcohol or tobacco. Where had he read that, anyway?

Frowning and massaging his temples, he tried to think, but then Ken sat down with a bowl of visipuuro, a cold and whipped lingonberry porridge made from wheat semolina served with milk and sugar.

"How are you feeling?" Ken asked, swirling his spoon around in his porridge to more evenly distribute the sugar and milk.

"Like I just got run over by a sixteen wheeler." Mark bit into his apple pastry, savoring the blend of tart and sweet on his tongue, and wishing he didn't sound as if his life were one big pity party he was hosting for himself. "Between McClanahan, Craig, Herb, and Coach Patrick, everyone seems to have a calendar that says it's Pick-Apart-Mark-Wells-Week."

"Things will look brighter in the morning." Ken paused to swallow a spoonful of porridge before continuing, "Everybody will find someone new to quarrel with tomorrow, and everything will be back to normal."

"Yep." Mark's teeth tore into a chunk of apple. "I'll still be too fucking short to make this team."

"I smell bullshit." Ken shook his head. "Almost all the forwards on this team are in the five-foot-eight to the five-foot-ten range, so you should feel right at home at this midget convention."

"Kenny, all those other forwards are short and _slight_." His eyes widening, Mark placed a weighty emphasis on this last adjective. "The two advantages of short athletes are supposed to be speed and agility, but you need to be slight in order to be truly mobile. Guess what? I'm about as slight as the proverbial fat lady who sings to ends stuff. My squatness is crappy because it makes it impossible for me to be fast or graceful, and Herb wants swift, smooth skating from his forwards."

"Even if you're more of a power skater than a smooth one, you're capable of some pretty superb bursts of acceleration," pointed out Ken, shoveling more porridge into his mouth. "You're also harder to knock off the puck than guys like McClanahan or Strobel. Your stocky build is an advantage, since it means you can be a small player who acts like a large one. That makes you a very special player any roster would be lucky to have, so just focus on your strengths, and don't worry about your weaknesses so much, okay?"

"Whatever you say," mumbled Mark, starting to eat his blueberry bun and noting inwardly that he might never be able to follow Ken's advice, because he knew that a player of his size and shape always had to prove his worth to coaches, just as he had at Bowling Green when he began freshman year without a full scholarship and ended as a leading scorer. Maybe his determination grated with his coaches, but if he didn't have that stubbornness, he never would have made any team. Being small and weak, as Darwin would have explained, essentially was a death sentence in a world of creatures that would gleefully devour one another alive, so it was no wonder that Mark had learned how to be tough to compensate for his small stature.

"Excellent." Ken's smile stretched from ear to ear. "You've got to remember that being small has its perks, Wellsy."

"Really?" Mark snorted into his coffee and stared at the ripples dancing across the burgundy liquid in concentric rings. "Name five."

"One, you don't have to be afraid of getting a concussion banging your head against low ceilings," responded Ken, as he ticked each reason off on a finger, and Mark surmised that each advantage would be more bizarre than the previous one. "Two, you can order off the kid's meal, which has all the best food, at restaurants, and nobody will look at you like you're a weirdo. Three, you can go on the children's rides at the amusement park, and those are the most fun. Four, you have to be cooler in the summer, because hot air rises. Five, in the case of carbon monoxide poisoning, you'd probably be the last to die, since the gas would cluster at the top of the room first."

"You're as mad as a hatter and as morbid as the resident of a rubber room busy slicing his wrists," Mark snickered, wondering why this grim truth made him feel like laughing so hard coffee would spring from his nostrils all over their booth.


	3. Chapter 3

"_The three worst things I've seen in hockey: the invention of the trap, the invention of the morning skate, and the invention of the extremely ugly uniform."—__**Brett Hull**_

The Terrible Triad

"Your hands are even clumsier than your feet, Wells," Herb barked, as Mark tried to ignore the acerbic criticism and instead focus on circling an orange cone and shooting a tape-to-tape backhand pass to Silky, because his last pass to Phil had fallen a bit short, prompting Herb to rocket through the roof of the Oulu arena they were practicing in and had been practicing in ever since disembarking the train at the station. Only when practice ended would their bus make the trek up to the campsite where the team would rest and recover for their game tomorrow, and, at the promising rate that practice was unfolding thus far, it seemed immensely probable that the phrase "after practice" was interchangeable with the grim term "never."

Now that the puck was in Silky's charge, Herb re-directed his perpetual ire toward another one of his favorite targets for verbal abuse, snapping, "Start skating, Silk! I've seen snails crawling through rivers of honey move at a greater clip than you."

Silky, who smelled as if alcohol was seeping from his pores to soak his pads, which probably meant that he had taken refuge in the dining car for another beer or five after Mark had left with Ken, attempted to obey Herb's barbed instruction and somehow found his skate blades tangled. He jerked them around rapidly, carving vicious slashes into the ice, but plummeted to the frozen surface in a face-plant before the blades could be dislodged from one another.

Any other coach in the hockey world would have possessed the requisite compassion to act as if Silky's being tripped by his own feet had never transpired, but, since any milk of human kindness that had once flowed through Herb's veins had long ago curdled to sour cream, he snarled, "Did you get a copy of the program, Silk? I'm running a hockey practice, not a damn slapstick comedy. Auditions for that are in Hollywood."

"Sorry," mumbled Silky, the letters slurred as if ground through a food processor, and Mark spared a likely wasted hope that Herb would attribute the elongated sounds to fatigue and embarrassment rather than a hangover. His movements stiff with shame and the aftereffects of inebriation, Silky managed to separate his blades and lurch to his feet. "Won't happen again. Promise."

"Don't make promises you can't keep." Herb's lips thinned as if few people on Earth were such constant sources of disappointment as Dave Silk. Somehow widening the radius of his glower so that it encompassed Mark and Phil as well, Herb continued in his most tart tone, "That's all, boys. I've seen enough to know that asking you three to compete against a competent fourth line would bring about a disgrace horrible enough to end humanity if the universe is feeling merciful. Take a water break since that is about all you're good for, and just stay out of my sight."

As he retreated toward the relative safety and anonymity of the bench, Mark could feel Herb's burning glare searing holes into his neck as the wrathful coach ordered tersely, "Johnson line, get back out here. I want you to show these clowns how not to make a joke out of this drill."

"Herb is such a bastard," hissed Silky, as they neared the bench, and Mark Johnson, Rob McClanahan, and Eric Strobel leapt over the boards onto the ice. "Next time he visits a zoo, I hope he topples into the anaconda's cage and gets strangled."

"He'd deserve it." Phil chuckled. "Since he's so frigid that he'd shit ice cubes if he swallowed magma, it fits that the only creature cold-blooded enough to hug him would be an anaconda."

"Is that supposed to make me feel less crappy?" Shooting Phil a withering glance that could have caused a rainforest to wilt, Silky hopped over the boards to fill a vacant spot beside OC. "I'm glad I have better friends than you, Phil."

"How many drinks do you reckon Silky tipped back last night, huh?" muttered Mark to Phil, as the two of them moved along the bench, searching for empty seats. "Enough to fill a silo or just a barrel?"

"That's a question we'd have to ask him," Phil answered, as they jumped over the boards to occupy a gap between Steve Christoff and Pav. "We shouldn't, though."

"Why not?" demanded Mark, because some practices—like this one—he was tired to the bone of pretending that he couldn't smell and practically taste the yeasty ferment of beer spilling from Silky's lips and skin. Silky's bingeing impacted their whole line, and there were times when he felt the Boston boy should be informed of that in no uncertain terms. When it came down to it, Mark didn't expect his teammates to be teetotalers, but some temperance would make practices and games much smoother. "Because he might lie to us?"

"No." Phil shook his head, unstoppering a water bottle and letting a stream of the liquid channel into his mouth. "Because he might tell us the truth, and then what defense would any of us have?"

Mark opened his mouth to retort that this proclamation made approximately as much sense as gravity reversing itself but bit his lip hard enough to deluge his tongue with the metallic tang of blood when he understood with the force of a train veering off the tracks that Phil was right. After all, it took two people to make a lie work: the one who told it and the one who believed it because it was more palatable than the truth. If you insisted on hearing the truth, you had to be prepared for it, and Mark wasn't confident he was. This time tomorrow he would probably rather be thinking that Silky's drinking wasn't a problem for anyone than that it was.

His tongue and lips suddenly drier than Death Valley, Mark snatched up a water bottle, but, since everything in his life was topsy-turvy, his fumbling fingers somehow accomplished the feat of turning it upside-down before it reached his lips so that water dribbled down his jersey instead of into his mouth.

"They say hockey payers are supposed to have drinking problems." Phil nudged Mark in the ribs, concealing a kernel of truth in a wisecrack and being at his most serious when he was jesting as was his penchant. "Way to prove them right, pal."

"Go play marbles on a runway." Mark wrinkled his nose, as he squirted water into his mouth from a bottle he was holding properly this time. "That would be more helpful than cracking your dumbass jokes."

"If it's helpfulness you're after, I can be way more helpful than that." Smirking, Phil extended a hand into the hogshead of extra sticks, yanked a strip of tape off one, and then grabbed a black marker Herb had used to outline the drill on the glass. "Let me make some improvements on the bottle, so you don't create your own waterpark again by trying to drink out of it backward."

As he watched Phil affix the sliver of tape to the bottle, Mark scowled when he recognized Rob McClanahan's neat, perfectly even letters than an elementary teacher could employ as examples in penmanship lessons. "Putting McClanahan's name on the bottle doesn't exactly improve it, Phil. It wasn't _that_ ugly to begin with. Certainly not as awful as it is now."

"Let the artist finish his masterpiece before you critique it, you buffoon." Phil spat on a finger and began to rub the dampened pad against the ink on the tape, grumbling, "This ink obviously isn't washable, since it's not coming off on my finger. Par for the course with him, Rob just had to be difficult and use permanent marker to write his name, so now there will have to be a hideous cross-out marring the middle of my magnum opus."

"I'm crying a new Mississippi at the very thought," observed Mark wryly, while Phil drew a line through Rob's name with the marker and then sketched two arrows on the tape, labeling the one pointing toward the lid "up" and the one directed toward the bottom "down."

"There you go." Phil's smug smile was reminiscent of a cat's that had just stolen an opened can of tuna. "Now you won't get confused about how to hold the bottle when you want to take a drink."

"McClanahan's going to blow a gasket when he discovers that you ripped the label off one of his sticks." Mark snickered, glad that the aggravating Rob McClanahan was going to get a small part of his comeuppance. "Good luck staying out of the blast zone when you're the one who will cause the explosion."

"I'll enjoy watching Mac on the warpath from my bomb shelter." Phil wiped a trickle of sweat off his forehead with a towel as Mark watched Johnson, McClanahan, and Strobel finish their drill, skating as smoothly and swiftly at the conclusion of their exercise as at the outset. Every movement in between had probably also been the epitome of grace, and each pass had most likely been the definition of seamless. No drill with Mark Johnson was ever a challenge, since the real power of Magic was his transcendent knack of making his linemates—no matter who they were—better. Magic could make a limbless chimpanzee play like Phil Esposito, and that was what made him such a gift to the team. "A homicidal Mac is always quality entertainment, and I'd nominate him for an Oscar except he isn't really _acting _angry is he?"

"Nope," replied Mark, more than a little bit absently, as he struggled to contain his jealousy for the members of the first line who were returning to the bench. "His rage is the genuine article."

"You're wishing that you could skate like they do, aren't you?" Phil arched an eyebrow at Mark.

"Buzz in somebody else's ear, fly." Feeling vulnerable because he didn't want anyone on the team except Ken to be able to decipher his expressions without a dictionary, Mark spurted a rainbow of water at Phil's helmet, showering them both in chilly jets. "Just because we're linemates doesn't mean that you can read my mind."

"Mind reading isn't necessary when your thoughts are written as clearly as the alphabet across your face." Eyes brimming with humor and intellect, Phil rapped Mark's helmet with the towel he had used to wipe off the water Mark had sprayed on his equipment by way of retaliation. "With a poker face like yours, I wouldn't recommend a trip to Las Vegas, but brighten up since at least you aren't alone in wishing that your skating stride could match Electric's or Mac's. The first time I saw them at practice at the U, I thought that I truly would give up an arm and a leg to be able to soar down the ice like that just once, because my blades always slice through the ice, but theirs just seemed to glide across it like bugs dancing across the still surface of a placid pond."

"You're so poetic." Mark stuck out his tongue, although he was thinking that a positive of being on the fourth line was all the bantering with Phil. Phil's cheeriness and wit almost compensated for Silky's cutting words, serrated glances, and pointed elbows to the ribs that were almost strong enough to rupture the lungs. "Most unfortunately for you, if you give up an arm and a leg, you'd probably never be able to skate like that, so you'd better develop your appreciation for situational irony."

"Good point." Phil grabbed the marker again, uncapped it, and leaned over the boards. "Since you just taught me something about hockey, I have to return the favor now, because my mama raised me to be polite."

"I can hardly wait." Mark snorted, because he already knew that whatever tidbit Phil was going to share would be more of a joke than a legitimate tip. "I hope my hand isn't trembling too much for me to take notes in my journal."

"Don't sass me unless you want a week's worth of tickets to detention, young man." Doing his best imitation of a stern teacher, Phil wagged an admonishing finger before sketching five stick figures on the boards, explaining, "That's us."

As another bunch of stick figures joined the first cluster, Phil continued, "That's the opposing team, and we try to get the puck in the net behind them—"he drew a square behind the figures representing the other team—"in order to score and win the game. It's all pretty simple once you break it down like that, isn't it?"

"Oh, definitely." Mark rolled his eyes. "Thanks for the insight. I don't know how I never saw hockey in that light before."

"I've been able to open many people's eyes to great wisdom over the years." Phil laughed. "Just go ahead and call me Socrates."

"If I do, does that mean you have to drink a vial of poison?" Mark's gaze expanded with exaggerated innocence.

Before Phil could respond, Herb called out in a voice loud enough to shatter eardrums in Venice, "We're going to start another drill now, gentlemen. I'm going to assign you linemates or a defense partner you aren't typically paired with. Your primary objective is to connect with your new linemates or defense partner—to merge with their strengths and cover their weaknesses. Then, if you're a forward, your secondary objective is to score, and, if you're a defenseman, your secondary objective is to prevent a goal. Has everyone grasped that?"

From the bench, there was a ripple of nods and a dull murmur of assent, which apparently satisfied Herb, who went on, "Morrow and Suter, you'll start on defense by Janny's net. O'Callahan and Baker, you'll protect Craig's net. Broten, you'll center Schneider and Strobel. Wells, you'll center McClanahan and Christoff. Now move it. I don't want this scrimmage to take all day."

Mark's stomach transformed into a bedrock of dread when he heard that he would be centering Rob McClanahan, because the two of them melding into an effective line would surely be one of the signs of the apocalypse given that they mixed about as faultlessly as oil and water.

Reminding himself severely to focus on his task and not his animosity toward Rob, Mark propelled himself over the boards and onto the ice. As center, it would be his responsibility to understand and anticipate what his wingers would do in any scenario so that he could better set them up with key scoring opportunities. That meant he had to reflect on what he had observed o both Rob's and Steve's playing styles, since that would provide him with a rubric for predicting what each winger would do with and without the puck.

Steve Christoff was a shoot-first player. There was no reason for him not to be when his wrist-shot made many goalies want to slit their own wrists. No matter how poor the spot he was aiming from, he had a honing beacon in his stick that often managed to direct the puck to the back of the net. He was the one Herb threw over the boards when a goal just had to be scored, because he just had the eerie habit of converting an impossible shot into a very real number on the scoreboard. A skilled, determined player, Steve would be single-minded in his purpose of getting the puck so that he could score, and what he would desire most in a center would be someone who could pass him the puck so that he could fire it into the goal.

On the other hand, Rob McClanahan was a different beast. His strength was in his speed, not his shot, and his trademark conscientiousness meant that he would rather make the safe play than take a crazy chance even if there was a large reward to offset the huge risk. At times, it seemed as if he were more concerned with his play when the puck wasn't in his possession than when it was and that he interpreted his duties more as keeping the other team off the scoreboard when he was on the ice than potting loads of goals himself. Phil had once quipped that it was a sort of mental damage sustained from killing too many penalties at the U, but the fact remained that if another team needed to be shut down during a penalty kill or a one goal lead had to be maintained with a minute left, Rob was a player Herb would often send out to neutralize the opposition's top scoring lines. Added together, all this meant Rob would want a quick and defensively responsible center.

Calming his mind, Mark glided up to the dot at center ice to take the faceoff against Neal. When Herb dropped the puck, Mark's stick flashed forward to capture it but found that it had already been abducted by Neal, who slid it across the ice to Eric.

Along the boards, a scuffle for puck possession ensued between Eric and Rob, which Rob actually managed to win, a feat that came as something of a shock to Mark, since Rob was notoriously bad at board battles, although he was typically shrewd enough not to engage in many of them because he lost the vast majority. Supposing that just as even a blind squirrel would stumble across an acorn eventually, so too would an extremely non-physical hockey player finally emerge victorious from a board battle, Mark joined the rush up ice that Rob was now spearheading.

"Pass, McClanahan," ordered Herb brusquely as Rob crossed the boundary separating neutral ice from their offensive zone with Mark and Steve mere inches behind at center and right wing. "The puck moves faster than you, so don't skate it up the ice. Pass it to an open teammate. I don't know how many times I'll have to say this before you remember to do it."

To show that he was free to receive a pass, Mark tapped his stick against the ice, but Rob didn't even spare him a glance before whipping the puck over to Steve. Immediately, Buzz and Neal swarmed in to pressure Steve, while Ken and Bob assumed positions around the net that blocked the most ideal shooting lanes from Steve's present location.

Steve stickhandled to avoid surrendering the puck to Buzz or Neal, while sweeping the ice with his eyes, searching for an opening for a shot on goal. Obviously not detecting one, he stalled long enough for Herb to bellow, "Don't be a puck hog, Christoff, because I don't allow pigs on this team. If you can't get a shot on net, pass to somebody on your team who can. That should be intuitively obvious to someone who has delusions about being a wonderful goal-scorer."

Again, Mark rapped his stick against the ice to communicate that he was open for a pass only to have his signal utterly ignored as Steve sent the puck sailing past him to land on the tape of Rob's stick. As Eric closed in around Rob, Mark felt his impatience mounting as his cheeks flushed with the shame of being ignored rather than from any exhaustion this exercise had produced in him. He couldn't center two wingers who played as if he weren't present. As for the whole point of this drill, he could count it as a lost cause, since he couldn't merge with the strengths and cover the weaknesses of a pair of linemates who seemed unaware that he existed, nonetheless competed on the same team as them.

Rather vindictively hoping that Herb chewed Rob and Steve up bite by bloody bite for rendering this exercise a total waste of time and energy for all involved, Mark hammered his stick against the ice with an inertia that was almost sufficient to break it. As he saw Rob's cunning brown eyes lock on him at last, Mark felt the tremors from the blow still shivering up and down his stick.

Thinking with a surge of pleasure that he was finally about to touch the puck, he noted in his peripheral vision that both Neal and Buzz were drifting over to cover him, leaving Steve relatively unguarded.

His gaze still fixed on Mark's, Rob flicked the puck over to Steve, who converted the tape-to-tape pass into a wrist-shot that found the back of the net an inch above Janny's outstretched glove.

Feeling almost as tricked as the opposition by Rob's duplicitous maneuver, Mark watched from a million miles away as Rob and Steve collided and clapped one another on the shoulders in mutual congratulation. From the beginning, Mark concluded darkly, it had been their drill, their challenge, and their teamwork being tested. Any notion that he could play a role in their triumph was just a fantasy, since, from the start, there had never been any room for him as far as these Minnesotan wingers were concerned.

"I don't know why you two idiots are so overjoyed about losing," Herb snarled, instantly transfiguring Rob and Steve's jubilation to bemusement, as frowns and furrowed brows replaced beams and glittering gazes. "I guess you two wanted to bring human stupidity to new levels, which is why you found a way to score and still fail this exercise."

"Of course we lost," mumbled Rob mutinously to Steve with just enough volume for Mark to overhear. "That's why we got the puck in the back of the net first. That just makes so much sense. I don't have a clue why we didn't look at it that way before."

"McClanahan," Herb rumbled like a thunderhead, turning the full brunt of his glower on Rob much to Mark's internal glee. Being the recipient of Herb's most condemning expression wasn't the worst thing in your world—having your intestines yanked out or getting your eyes gauged out by a hot poker were probably more agonizing—but it was definitely in the top ten, and if anyone deserved to have Herb's look of maximum displeasure bestowed upon them it was Rob McClanahan. "You scored but you lost. I don't see what's so hard to comprehend about that. What did I say was the primary objective of this drill?"

"To connect with our linemates, merging with their strengths and covering their weaknesses," recited Rob after a moment's hesitation with the flat inflection of a bored docent at a paper clip museum.

"Correct. Maybe one day you'll convince me that you have a long term memory almost as excellent as a gold fish's, McClanahan." Herb offered a brief nod before riveting his attention on Steve. "Tell me, Christoff. Did you three merge with one another's strengths and cover each other's weaknesses to the best of your clearly limited abilities?"

"Yep." His jaw tightening like a vise, Steve jabbed a finger at Rob. "He passed to me, and I scored. That's a textbook example of linemates being in sync with each other."

"Humph." Plainly not mollified by Steve's statement, Herb snorted. "What was Wells' role in the goal? I don't recall seeing him touching the puck."

Mark took an abrupt and intense interest in his skate laces as Steve answered in a tone as crisp as November frost, "He didn't need to touch the puck, because his job was just to be a red herring and not fuck everything up."

Mark opened his mouth to argue that he would have messed anything up if he had been given half a chance to participate in the drill, but he was cut off before he could begin by Herb declaring repressively, "Unless all linemates are involved in the play on every shift, that line is not functioning as effectively as it can, Christoff. All I asked of you boys was that you work together. If I had set my standards any lower, you would've needed a damn backhoe to reach them and still you found a way to disappoint me. Go back to the bench, all of you, if you're capable of doing even that much right."

His skin ablaze and his blood boiling, Mark joined the tributary of players steaming back to the bench, hissing to Rob and Steve, who were skating alongside him, "If either of you assholes had just fucking passed to me, we wouldn't have screwed up the drill."

"Why should I have passed to _you_?" Rob arched an eyebrow and adopted his loftiest since-I-know-you-have-an-IQ-in-the-negative-spectrum-I'll-be-gracious-and-not-speak-at-a-rate-exceeding-one-syllable-per-minute-but-you-must-appreciate-what-an-exertion-that-is-for-someone-of-my-superior-intelligencetone. "Steve was open, too, and he has a shot that's about fifty times better than yours will ever be."

His blood roaring in his ears and thudding through his veins, Mark volleyed back, "How the hell would you know that for sure when you never even pass to me? You're just making shit up to try to justify you're screwing up this whole exercise."

"You harbor under the delusion that your shot will ever be better than Steve's, and you think I'm the one lying to myself," scoffed Rob, studying Mark with a derision that suggested Mark had just been socially inept enough to wear sweatpants to a black tie event. "What are you—eleven?"

"Yeah, that's right." Mark's eyes narrowed like a serpent's when it was poised to strike a heel. "On a perfection scale of one to ten, I'm an eleven, so you've got tons to learn from me."

"You would break the scale." Rob scraped at his cuticles in a scornful manner that implied he deemed the health and maintenance of his nails infinitely more fascinating than anything Mark could ever say or do. "After all, you ruin everything else."

Mark longed to offer a rejoinder about Rob's hockey prowess or lack thereof, but a terrible fear that Herb and his other teammates might feel the same way Rob did seized his throat and prevented him from speaking or even breathing properly. This sensation of inadequacy and alienation lingered with him throughout the remainder of practice, and on the bus ride to the campsite, he pretended to be napping against the cool glass of his window so that he wouldn't have to explain to Ken, who was seated beside him, the monster that was eating his heart.

Only when the bus pulled into the campsite did Mark's spirit lighten. Cabins and fire pits freckled a forest of spruces and firs that girdled a lake formed when the glaciers of the last Ice Age melted a retreat further into the Arctic Circle. The pine scent of burning wood wafted through the pastel sunset sky, and the lake was a tranquil mirror of the red, orange, yellow, and purple clouds bleeding together in the heavens as the sun writhed in its final death throes.

All around him, pain stemmed from beauty like thorns from a rose. The blazing fires surrounded by laughing campers cooking dinner were built from fallen branches and dead trees, while in the middle of the lake, a craggy island that had first caught Mark's attention because of how its grey rocks reflected the perishing sun's variegated hues, resembled a steel dagger prepared to plunge into a victim's chest.

"Time to go jump in a lake," sang Neal, abandoning his duffel bag by a stump and darting toward the lake as though convinced it would run away from him if he did not hasten to meet it at once.

"Or take a long walk off a short pier," Dave Christian exclaimed, dashing after Neal.

Feeling excited just witnessing how happy a lake to wade in made Neal and Dave, Mark hopped on top of the stump near Neal's duffel and informed Ken in a smug voice, "I'm taller than you. You should've listened to your mother and eaten all your vegetables as a child."

"How do you know I didn't?" countered Ken, leaping onto a stump even more sizeable than Mark's. "I mean, I just had another growth spurt, so I'm taller than you again."

"Not for long!" Mark shouted, launching through the air like a flying monkey and latching onto Ken's shoulders, so he hung there like a human backpack. "Now I'm bigger than you again."

"Of course you are." Ken's laugh rang off the lake and echoed through the woods. "Having you hanging off my shoulders makes me bend over like a hunchback at some house of horrors."


	4. Chapter 4

"_Don't worry, Doc. If that happens, I can always come back as a forward."—__**Defenseman Harold Snepsts after receiving advice from a doctor to wear a helmet to avert brain damage. **_

Always Come Back

"I hereby open today's shooting contest," proclaimed Rizzo, shaping his fingers into a pistol and pretending to fire at the rafters of the Oulu arena where they were warming up for a game against the city's professional hockey club. "Competitors will shoot from the blue line, aiming top shelf where Mom keeps the cookies. Electric, why don't you go first?"

"Sounds great," Eric answered, emerging from the knot of Mark, Rob, Steve, Neal, Bah, Buzz, Phil, and Johnson to skate up to the blue line. A grin splitting his cheeks from ear to ear, Eric wound up for a slapshot that banged off the right goalpost.

"Bad luck getting eliminated on your first shot," commiserated Rizzo, clapping Eric on the shoulder.

"Easy come and easy go." Eric shrugged and gestured for Neal to take his place at the blue line. "It must have been the pressure of going first."

Neal launched a slapshot that found its target in the top part of the net. Beaming as he remained alive for the next portion of the competition, Neal stepped back to allow Steve to move up to the blue line.

Steve drew his stick back for a powerful slapshot, but his stick splintered as soon as it hit the ice before it could make contact with the puck. Spotting this, Mark couldn't stifle a smirk since participants were automatically eliminated from the shooting contest if their sticks shattered.

Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he glimpsed Pav, who was deking invisible defenders, wink at him. Wondering if he was hallucinating things and figuring that he could always claim he had just been blinking a speck out of his eye, Mark returned the gesture even if he wasn't sure if Pav was watching.

"Good effort, Steve." Rizzo patted Steve's helmet, apparently not discouraged from overt displays of affection by the sour scowl on Steve's lips that suggested he had just swallowed the bitterest of pills. "You just put a little too much energy behind your hit this time."

"You don't say?" Steve etched sarcasm into every snide syllable. "Oh, so that must be why my stick broke. Who would have guessed? Surely not anyone who thought about it for even a second."

Huffing, Steve sped over to the bench to guzzle down some water that would probably not bank the blaze of his temper, while Phil skated up to the blue line to hit a slapshot that went top shelf into the net.

Following Phil, Bah and Buzz managed to fire slapshots that landed top shelf in the goal. After those two success stories, Rob experienced a failure when his stick, like Steve's, broke into smithereens the instant it made contact with the ice before it could strike the puck. As he listened to Rob curse the puck's parentage in a very creative manner, Mark again found himself snickering as he caught Pav's gaze, and, this time, he could have sworn in a court without fear of perjury that he saw Pav flash him a quick thumbs-up.

"If I were you, Wells—a hypothetical situation that makes me sick to contemplate—I'd wipe that stupid sneer off your face before someone smacks it off and spoils the scant decent looks you had," snapped Rob, obviously detecting Mark's snicker and whirling around to glare at Mark with enough heat to evaporate the icebergs in the Arctic.

"Something stinks around here." Mark waved a hand in front of his nose as if he had just scented a foul stench. "Oh, it's a sore loser, McClanahan."

"Better a sore loser than a filthy cheater, which is what you are, Wells," riposted Rob, folding his arms across his chest.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Mark demanded, planting his balled fists on his hips, as the blood pounding in his head reverberated against his eardrums with the compelling martial force of the war dances of his Chippewa ancestors. "How the fuck am I a cheater?"

"I should think that's as plain as the nose on your face, but I'll humor you." Rob's eyes narrowed as he thrust each word at Mark like a honed dagger. "You cut Steve's and my sticks so that they'd break as soon as they hit the ice, and if that's fair then I'm the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court."

"I—" Abruptly, it dawned on Mark how so far only Rob and Steve's sticks had splintered, which made him wonder if Pav had cut their sticks as a lesson for snubbing Mark during yesterday's training exercise-"I didn't do anything."

"You d-d-didn't?" Rob's face was tight with spite as he mocked Mark's slight stutter. "Why d-d-don't I believe you because it's too convenient?"

"Relax, Robbie." Johnson extended a hand to give Rob's shoulder a placatory squeeze. "Play nicely with others. It's just a game. We're supposed to be having fun, not risking apoplexy."

"Games are no fun when cheaters are involved." Rob's glower remained fixed on Mark. "Tell Wellsy to play nicely with others, Magic, since he doesn't seem to know not to cheat, although that's the first lesson anyone should learn on the elementary school playground."

"Do you have any evidence that Wellsy cheated, Mac?" Rizzo lifted an eyebrow. "If not, why don't you step aside and let everyone else keep playing, all right?"

"I don't need evidence when I know the truth, but by all means continue with your farce, and I hope Wellsy becomes the top jester." Tilting his nose in the air haughtily, Rob executed one of his perfect pivots and retreated to the bench, doubtlessly to expound upon his most recent suspicions against Mark to Steve, the player on the team who at the present had the highest odds of being sympathetic to such theories and complaints.

"Right, Wellsy." Rizzo exhaled gustily as the thunderhead that was Rob disappeared to bestow more joy on other fortunate individuals. "It's your turn."

Taking a deep breath through his mouth and letting it stream slowly out of his nostrils in an effort to focus on the contest rather than his endless battle with Rob, Mark approached the blue line and fired a slapshot that landed top shelf in the net and allowed him to advance to the next stage of the competition.

"Excellent shot," called Rizzo, clapping his palms together briskly as Mark, satisfied that he had at least done better than Rob and Steve, drifted away from the blue line to permit Johnson to take his place. "Now it's Magic's chance to shine."

Sliding over to where Pav was practicing alone, Mark muttered, his cheeks red as ripe tomatoes, "Thanks."

Giving a shadow of a smile, Pav nodded as if to both acknowledge the prank he had committed on Mark's behalf and establish that it had been nothing.

Feeling touched that anyone on the team who wasn't named Ken Morrow would be concerned with his welfare, nonetheless prepared to fight for it, Mark asked, stumbling over the words as if he had gravel in his mouth, "Why did you do it, Pav?"

"They—" Pav jerked his chin at Rob and Steve to indicate whom the plural pronoun referenced—"don't see you. They don't see me either."

His eyes locked on Mark's, Pav continued giving what to him amounted to a grand public declamation, "I don't care, but you do. Now they have to really look at you."

"I suppose they do." Mark chuckled. Finding himself overwhelmed with the urge to slap Pav on the back, he didn't deny it, and commented as his hand made contact with Pav's back, "You should talk more, Pav. I'd rather hear what you've got to say than the shit McClanahan spews like a broken sewage pipe."

Before Pav could reply if he was even going to engage in such a protracted conversation with another teammate, Rizzo shouted from the left faceoff circle, where the remaining contestants—Johnson, Neal, Phil, Bah, and Buzz- were ringed around him, "Hey, Wellsy! Are you surrendering or what?"

"Nah." Mark glided over to the faceoff circle to join the rest of the survivors of the first round of the shooting contest. "That's just what all my opponents wish on a star that I was doing."

"He should be accessed a delay of game penalty," remarked Rob primly from the bench. "Perhaps that would teach him to be more punctual."

"There's no clause in the rulebook about that," Rizzo responded with a gravity that implied there was a rulebook as important as the Constitution governing their shooting competition when, in reality, there was no rulebook whatsoever. "That means Wellsy can resume play right now without any sort of penalty. Now, Wellsy, you guys are going to try to score high on the glove side from this faceoff circle. Neal will go first."

Neal's aim was true, but Phil's shot sailed wide of the net to the left, while Bah's did the same on the right. Then it was Mark's turn, and he relished the glares from Steve and Rob that he could feel burning holes in his neck like cigarette butts as the puck he fired flew into the net high on the glove side. In fact, he was so enraptured in the triumph that came from knowing he was infuriating Rob and Steve by his mere continued presence in the competition that he almost missed Johnson's shot landing smoothly in the high glove side of the goal.

"Time to move onto the next faceoff circle," announced Rizzo, shepherding Mark, Buzz, Neal, and Johnson to the right faceoff dot. "Now you guys have to aim low on the blocker side."

By the end of this round, only Mark and Johnson remained alive in the contest. Neal had been eliminated when his shot had hit a water bottle on top of the net instead of entering the goal, and Buzz was finished when his shot had bounced off the crossbar.

"Down to the final two." Rizzo rubbed his hands together, his face a beacon of excitement. "Time to up the ante. I want you both to try to score a wraparound goal. Wellsy, you're up first."

Glancing over at the bench to ascertain that Rob and Steve were still watching the show, Mark spotted Herb standing there, appraising Mark with eyes as cold and cunning as a serpent's. After reminding himself to concentrate, Mark told himself that this was an opportunity to impress Herb that he could not afford to squander. Obviously, he could never be better than Johnson on a consistent basis because there was a reason the Madison native had the appellation Magic, but he could beat Johnson by sheer tenacity in one competition and be the best forward on the team for at least one moment in time, and he was resolved to achieve such a feat with Herb as an onlooker.

Gritting his teeth, Mark wheeled around the net, feeling as though he were a shark chasing prey, and then shoved the puck into the goal as he completed curving around it.

"Done." Mark nodded at Johnson, while his mind and body readied themselves for the next phase of the shooting contest. "It's your turn."

Johnson glided around the net with the puck on his stick, and Mark fully anticipated the puck sliding smoothly into the goal, but instead it skidded away toward the boards.

As he raised his arms in the air in the universal expression of victory, Mark's gaze shifted over to the bench to check if Herb was suitably impressed by his triumph—however fleeting—over Johnson, but his heart sank into his stomach when he realized that Herb, busy scrawling notes on a scrap of paper, seemed not to have noticed Mark's moment of glory.

"Congratulations!" exclaimed Johnson, enveloping Mark in a hug, and Mark supposed that it was easy for Johnson to be gracious in defeat when he so rarely lost anything and could be confident of winning whatever the next competition was. When it boiled down to it, Johnson was friendly and unfailingly polite but he didn't understand what it was like to go through life having to forever cast off the label of failure that was so cruelly and unjustly affixed to your forehead as Mark did. "Great job, Wellsy!"

"You too." Mark smiled, as he recognized that his entire frame was quaking with the adrenaline onrush brought on by victory. "I guess the puck just hit a rough patch of ice for you."

"I've got no excuse." Johnson nudged Mark in the ribs. "You were just better than me and won fair and square, so don't rub my nose in it."

Hoping that Rob, who respected Johnson's opinion as much as he was capable of esteeming anyone's, had overheard the bit about his winning being fair and square, Mark returned to the bench. As he settled into a space beside Ken, he tried to convince himself that Herb had seen his performance in the shooting contest no matter what appearances had indicated on the contrary and would give Mark a chance to prove his worth in a spot higher in the lineup…

Perhaps it was the fact that he had almost persuaded himself that this was definitely going to transpire that made his whole body and soul freeze when, ten minutes into the game, Herb tapped him on the shoulder, barking, "Wellsy, next shift you'll play right wing on Broten's line."

Bristling because he was a center and he didn't appreciate Herb implying that he wasn't good enough to be one, especially on this team, Mark said in a tone as stiff as a fake smile, "I'm a center, not a winger."

"On this team, you'll play whatever position I tell you, or you won't play at all," countered Herb in a voice frigid enough to bring the temperature of the arena into the negative range.

Massaging his temples as Herb stride back down the bench, snarling at Christoff that he was to remain at right wing on Broten's line, Mark saw Rob glaring lightning bolts Zeus would have been glad to hurl at him. No doubt Rob thought he was a center who was too much of a position snob to even entertain the possibility of playing what many regarded as the inferior role of winger, but it wasn't as simple as that. He was well aware that this team was so loaded with centers that many adept centers—Rob, Steve, and Eric sprang to mind instantaneously—were already converted to wingers, but he questioned his ability to shift to wing as seamlessly as they did.

He was a rigid player who preferred to have his role defined for him so he could know what was expected of him, and a new position meant a different role with varying expectations that he would be relied upon to fulfill without instruction in the midst of a game. Sure, he understood what his wingers did, but that was in the same way that he knew what his defensemen and his goalie did. It was a periphery knowledge that wouldn't have allowed him to play winger with any more skill than a deaf man could the clarinet. He didn't want to humiliate himself or hurt his team. Why were Herb and Rob so determined to perceive malice and disdain where there was none?

Drowning in a river of resentment, Mark concluded that Herb and Rob's suspicions about him were merely reflections of terrible darkness they carried around in their own hearts. All his conflicts with them were more rooted in their own issues and insecurities than they were in his, but that notion was sparse solace to him throughout the rest of the game as Herb delivered on his threat and staunchly refused to play Mark until the final horn sounded.

Still sulking over being benched like a Pee Wee who had arrived late to a playoff game, Mark griped to Ken as they sat next to each other on the bus driving them back to the campsite, "I can't believe Herb was enough of a bastard to want me to play winger when I had just beaten Johnson in a shooting contest. I mean, what the fuck more can he expect from a forward than that? Him asking me to play winger after that was the worst insult I've ever received from a coach, and, yep, that includes all the gibes about how with my height I should audition for a role as a Munchkin in a production of _The Wizard of Oz_ instead of wasting my time trying out for a hockey team."

"Calm down before that vein throbbing in your throat finally explodes under the pressure, Mark." Tugging meditatively on his earlobe, Ken continued in a level voice that suggested they were discussing nothing more stressful than what brand of milk at the supermarket was the best bargain, "Maybe you're looking at this the wrong way. Isn't it possible that Herb ordering you to play right wing on Neal's line was more of a compliment than an insult?"

"Yeah, right." Mark snarled, fogging the window with the exhaust of his breath. "It's possible it was compliment in the same way it's possible that Santa Claus lives with the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny at his North Pole toy factory."

"Don't be a jerk." Ken elbowed Mark in the ribcage. "Anyway, aren't wingers supposed to be the best scorers on the team, so couldn't Herb have asked you to play right wing on the second line because he was impressed by your shot?"

Biting his lip, Mark wondered whether Herb had reacted so hostilely to his declaration that he was a center, not a winger, because, from Herb's perspective, he had been throwing away the gift of an opportunity to play on the second line and find a place on the team as a winger since the team was so bloated with centers Mark was unlikely to make the roster in that position.

"It was stupid of him to expect that I could transition from center to winger at the drop of a pin," scoffed Mark, squelching the jealous voice inside him that observed Rob, Steve, and Eric could probably accomplish such a task without batting an eyelash. "That's the definition of being an asshole."

Mark remained in this black mood as the bus pulled into the campsite and the team streamed out of the vehicle and into their cabins with their equipment bags slung over their shoulders.

"Holy crap, I feel as if I've just been beaten by a thousand clubs," grumbled Silky, collapsing on his bunk and rubbing his presumably aching muscles. "I could sleep for a fucking week and still feel like shit."

"You're lucky to be tired." Far from being disposed to greet complaints about physical exhaustion with sympathy, Mark found each reminder that his teammates had taken ice time that should have gone to him more stinging than a slap across the cheek, so he glowered balefully at Silky. "That means you got to play, so stop bitching. It's basketball players, not hockey players, who are supposed to be whiny bastards."

"You're quite mopey for someone accusing somebody else of being a wimp," retorted Silky, sticking his tongue out at Mark.

"Yeah, it's your own damn fault that you didn't get a smidgen of ice time," Steve added, studying Mark with a hatred that suggested he was a demon spawn. "You could have gotten my ice time, but I guess it wasn't good enough for you, so I don't know what the hell you're moaning about."

"Oh, isn't it abundantly clear that no winger's ice time would be good enough for him, Steve?" put in Rob, who was sprawled on his top bunk, bouncing a soccer ball off his feet and head with an almost nauseating amount of fervor given that he had just finished playing first line minutes in a hockey game. "As a center, he's much too exalted to play wing. He'd rather not play at all than lower himself to the level of us peasants."

Wishing that the soccer ball would hit Rob's thick head with enough force to give him a concussion, Mark hissed, "If you got your brain out of your butt long enough to have a real idea about anything for once, McClanahan, it might occur to you that I don't know how to play wing that well."

"Bullshit." Rob kicked the soccer ball from his right foot to his left. "Winger is a less complicated position than center, so if you can play center, you can play winger, too. You see, when your center takes a faceoff, you get prepared to receive a pass. When the puck goes along the boards, you retrieve it and pass it to your center. If the action is in the offensive zone, you forecheck, but if it's in the defensive zone, you backcheck. It's so simple a kid could do it, and, in fact, many of them do. The only reason you can't play winger is because you _won't_. I just wanted you to know that I could detect your lie with almost zero mental exertion, so why don't you have the balls to admit that you see wingers as an inferior breed to centers?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Robbie," chimed in Johnson from the bunk below Rob's, and Mark thought that Johnson should have fun striking his left winger's fragile ego back to its normal excessive size so that their line could function optimally without any friction. "_Nobody _thinks that since it sounds like the sort of idea someone would concoct after smoking some serious dope—you know, the kind that makes people take an intense interest in individual carpet fibers."

"Zip it, Magic. I wasn't talking to you." Rob's dark eyes speared into Mark. "I want to hear Wellsy's answer, and I can guarantee it won't be as tactful as yours."

"What do you want me to say, McClanahan?" Mark forced his mouth into a jeer when all he really wanted to do was sleep so he could forget another dreadful day in which he had managed to further estrange himself from Herb and his teammates who weren't called Ken Morrow. "Everyone who has so much as watched a hockey game realizes that centers are about three times more valuable than wingers. Don't hate the player; hate the game."

"Indeed." Rob's lips thinned as he arched an icily inquisitive eyebrow in Mark's direction. "I gather you see yourself as just a center, don't you?"

"I'm a center." His jaw taut, Mark nodded, because he was unwilling to cede any of his identity, since that was the mistake his Chippewa ancestors had made during the Westward Expansion, and he was still paying for their weakness in the scorn he felt for himself and from others. "Not a winger. Not a defenseman. Not a goalie."

"What a marvelous coincidence. I'm a center, too." Rob hit the soccer ball with his inflated head. "The only difference between you and me is that I'm a center who plays wing, while you're a center who doesn't play at all. Isn't that fascinating?"

"Not as fascinating as watching your eyes get pecked out by a crow would be," Mark volleyed back.

Before Rob, whose mouth was already opening to provide some witty comeback, could offer a rejoinder, Johnson tugged on the arm Rob had dangling by his bunk, saying, "Let's go get some wood to build a fire, Robbie. We need to eat some dinner."

"That's a brilliant suggestion, Magic." Rob whistled in a distinctly ironic fashion. "We could build the fire in the stove in here, so the soot blows in all our eyeballs, or we could build it in one of the fire pits outside so that when the rain that has been threatening to come all day finally arrives, the wood will get soaked and the flames extinguished. It's overwhelming how many wonderful choices and merry outcomes there are."

"You're such a lazy bump on a log." Johnson twisted Rob's arm. "Come on. The sooner we go, the faster the nightmares that you described can become reality."

"Ouch," yelped Rob. "Damn it, Magic, this may come as a shock to you, but my arm is attached to the rest of my body, and, consequently, is not designed to be bent that way, since it could be removed from its socket."

"Your lips are moving, and all I hear is whining." Johnson laughed as he gave another yank on Rob's arm. "Grow up and accept that stretching is good for you, Mac."

"Stretching is good for me, but dislocating my arm isn't." Heaving a melodramatic sight, Rob extricated his arm from Johnson's clasp and leapt over his bunk's railing down to the floor. "Look out below. Bombs away. Hurry up, Magic. I don't feel like waiting all night for you so we can complete our mission."

"I never keep my friends waiting." Johnson rolled out of his bunk. "Honestly, it's a mystery to me how you could even hint that I would do such a horrible thing."

"Which friends are you talking about?" inquired Rob as he and Johnson walked out of the cabin to search for wood. "Would you be referring to your legions of imaginary ones?"

As the door slammed shut in Rob and Johnson's wake, blocking out their banter, Mark closed his eyes and cradled his head in his pillow, embracing the nap that was trying to wrap around the tendrils of his mind. At this point of a long and wearying day, a nap before dinner was welcome, because he knew that it would bring no nightmares. In his dreams, nothing would go wrong, since, in his dreams, he always did everything right. That was why his nightmare would be whatever he found when he awakened in this cabin and remembered that he did nothing right, which was why he had few friends but many foes.


	5. Chapter 5

"_Win today, and we walk together forever."—__**Fred Shero to his Stanley Cup winning team prior to game six of the 1974 Stanley Cup Finals**_

Together Forever

The walls and rafters of the cabin rattled with laughter, and Mark, sprawled on his bunk, felt both a part of the merriment and as if he were a mile in the atmosphere, observing the chaos from an impartial and indifferent distance. Per OC's after dinner suggestion, they were embroiled in a dare competition like none other Mark had ever participated in, because there were teams but never any permanent ones. Each round two random boys would be challenged to complete a dare by whatever pair had just finished the previous dare, and then the duo, upon the conclusion of their own assignment, would pick a dare for the next lucky set of players.

It was the sort of intense and ephemeral game that OC would invent as an extension of himself, Mark supposed, as he watched Neal Broten and Dave Christian rise to offer a stirring rendition of the eternal classic "I'm a Little Teapot" as they had been challenged to do by Steve Christoff and Eric Strobel, who had themselves just finished licking the dirty cabin floor for a minute.

Neal's squeaky mouse voice making an odd contrast to Dave's almost disconcertingly deep alto, Neal and Dave belted, "I'm a little teapot, short and stout."

Wondering why short and stout objects were always subjects of mockery but tall and thin ones never were, Mark watched Neal and Dave plant a hand on one hip for the teapot's handle and the other arm straight out for the spout, while they continued to sing at full and considerable volume, "Here is my handle, and here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout: 'Just tip me over, and pour me out!'"

As the song ended, and Dave and Neal bent over to mime pouring tea from a spout, claps and whistles rang through the cabin like firecrackers cutting through an Independence Day sky. After accepting the applause with bows exaggerated for comedic effect, Neal and Dave began issuing the next dare to the following fortunate pair.

"I'm still in the mood for some good, old American music," observed Dave, grinning as he nudged Neal. "Since these Finnish radio stations don't play any tunes we can translate, we'll just have to make our own."

"Definitely." Neal was smiling the toothy beam of a rambunctious puppy who had just found a beautiful satin curtain to chew to paste for the fun and taste of it. "I'm feeling in the mood for some sweet romance."

"Me too. Aretha Franklin's hit 'You Make Me Feel like a Natural Woman' would be perfect for this moment." His face shiny as a freshly-minted penny, Dave jabbed a finger at first OC and then Silky. "Your turn to stink up the place and blast out our eardrums with your version of that song."

"Time for us to take center stage as we deserve," remarked OC boisterously, snatching a scowling Silky's elbow and dragging him to the middle of the cabin. "This is our breakout moment. From now on, we'll dominate the charts and airwaves. We'll be as famous as Queen soon enough."

"Yeah, right," Rizzo teased from his bunk, while Mark rolled his eyes at OC's unfettered lunacy. "I'm much more likely to hurl rotten tomatoes at you than buy your album, and I think your entire audience would agree with me about that."

"Shut the hell up, and use your rectum as a filing cabinet for your rotten tomatoes," snapped Silky in a menacing tone that made it abundantly clear that he would play the fool in a jangling bell cap to complete a dare but he would not be ridiculed. "If you don't, you might find your face spattered like a rotten tomato."

"We're going to provide you with a real education in music, so listen up, Rizzo," added OC, and it was impossible to tell where his bravado ended and his true self began. "Soon you'll be admitting that we sing better than the Boston Symphony Orchestra."

"I should hope you do," Rob commented, sour as a spoiled lemon tart, from his bed, where he was engrossed in _Wuthering Heights_. "After all, the Boston Symphony Orchestra doesn't sing at all, because it's an orchestra, not an opera, you moron."

"The house requests complete silence from the crowd for the duration of the performance so as to not distract our singers or fellow audience members." Straightening his spine, OC assumed his most outrageously pompous manner. "Don't be that asshole who ruins the show with your loud and obnoxious commentary, Robbie, because I'm sure your mother taught you not to disturb those who are trying to drink in the wisdom of the arts with your vacuous remarks."

"If you and Silky singing a pop song is art, then so is pole-dancing." Rob flipped to the next page in his novel.

"If the _Birth of Venus_ by Botticelli is art, then so is pole-dancing." OC waved his arm about dramatically as he offered this counterpoint, and for probably the millionth time since the outset of the European tour, Mark was jealous of his bombast. "Both are all about the sensuality of nude women."

"Your pitiful lack of culture disgusts me." Rob's lips thinned in disapproval. "I bet you're so unsophisticated that you think Andy Warhol's _Campbell's Soup Cans_ is as evocative and hauntingly enigmatic as Da Vinci's _Mona Lisa_."

"I'm very avant garde," proclaimed OC, and Mark would have to rummage through a dictionary to figure out what that even meant. A debate between OC and Rob always provided proof that his vocabulary was nowhere near as broad as he thought. "Bad art is still art because it illustrates the ugliness and idiocy of this world. Now the show must go on."

With that final declaration, OC burst into the opening strain of Aretha Franklin's iconic song, and, a beat later, Silky contributed his voice, which was about an octave less enthusiastic. While Silky remained stony-faced, OC winked, batted his eyelashes, and even outdid himself in hilarity by blowing air-kisses at each of the cabin's occupants as he and Silky finished the last chorus on a high note.

"Thank God that's over." Rob glanced witheringly over the spine of _Wuthering Heights_. "I'm surprised you didn't shatter the glass in all the windows, but we've got to praise the Lord for small miracles."

"What a cliché comment." Reproachfully, OC shook his head. "If you don't have an original insult, staple your lips closed and spare us all the agony of your failure to be creative. You disappoint me, so to atone for that, you can receive the next dare. Is your heart racing yet?"

"Actually, it's barely got a pulse." Rob turned a page with a supremely dismissive manner. "I know you lack the imagination to invent anything truly terrible for me to undergo. You're no more an evil genius than Audrey Hepburn is a hideous whore."

"Cockiness killed the cat more gruesomely than curiosity did." OC clicked his tongue in rebuke and then went on in the somber fashion of a mayor declaring a day of mourning after a tragedy, "As punishment for your crimes against civilization, you'll swim out to the rocky island in the middle of the lake, climb to the summit, dive into the lake, and then swim back to the dock. To simplify the concept so an imbecile like you can comprehend it, you'll literally go and jump into a lake because I said so."

Mark snickered, thinking that he would relish standing dry on the dock with the rest of his teammates while his current worst enemy swam halfway across the lake, scaled the crag of a stony island, and then returned to shore with shivering skin and chattering teeth.

Perhaps his sneer reminded Silky of how Mark had lashed out at him for griping about his aching muscles after the game, because Silky riveted an iceberg glare that sunk Mark's heart like the _Titanic_ upon him. "Wellsy can be Mac's partner in this dare."

"I could use something to break up the boredom." Doing his best to act unfazed by the prospect of swimming through a cold lake to climb a cliff with one of his least favorite beings on the planet as his sole companion, Mark leapt off his bunk onto the floor and shot Rob a goading glance. "I'm game if you are, McClanahan."

"How could I refuse such charming company?" Rob slapped his book shut and pushed himself down from his top bunk.

Rolling his eyes at Rob's sarcasm, Mark strode out of the cabin faster than a strong breeze slicing through a pile of autumn leaves. As he lead a tangle of his teammates down the dark path between tree branches that formed ominous, gaping mouths overhead like monsters lurking in nightmares, Mark thought that he would rather fulfill this dare by himself than alongside the abrasive Rob McClanahan.

"Remember to take off your shoes before jumping in," advised Ken in a quiet voice, as he slipped beside Mark on the left, and their feet resounded against the oak planks for the dock. "Don't want them dragging you down."

"I'm not stupid," Mark muttered, bending over to remove his sneakers when they reached the end of the dock. Looking to his right, he saw Rob doing the same, and he snorted. To take his mind off this sickening reminder of who his companion in this dare would be, he fixed his eyes on the sky, and his stomach tightened as it occurred to him that the moon resembled a dead, white eye, and the yellow stars looked like maggots scattered across a decomposing corpse. "If I was dumb enough to jump into a lake with shoes on, I'd deserve to drown."

Ignoring Mark's irascibility as usual, Ken continued, waving a cloth around like the banner of a conquering army, "I have your towel here for when you come back."

"Great. Thanks." With a terse nod of gratitude, Mark took a deep breath and moved toward the very edge of the dock, where water kissed wood with a gentle, seductive lover's murmur.

Feeling the oxygen trickle from his lungs into his bloodstream, Mark jumped into the water. As the chilled liquid washed over his head, he wondered if it had ever been warm, but found his thought process interrupted with a jolt as waves swept over him from Rob leaping into the lake as well.

His damp clothes already heavy and taut around the prickly gooseflesh that had replaced his skin, Mark began to swim toward the craggy island in the lake's center, hearing more than seeing Rob keep a steady pace beside him with methodical, measured strokes.

Figuring that an extra competition might warm him, he tossed at Rob through his wheeling arms, "Race you to the island."

"Fair warning." Rob's strokes increased in tempo. "At summer camp, I was the gold ribbon winner in every swimming contest."

"The naked eye can't see the number of fucks I give," scoffed Mark, his feet kicking more rapidly toward the island. "I'm the best swimmer ever to dip a toe in the Great Lakes."

"You're on, then!" With a farewell smirk, Rob streaked forward like an eel with Mark hot on his paddling heels, and Mark almost caught up to him, but his palms touched the boulder beach an instant before Mark's own.

Gasping, Mark treaded water by the stony shore of the island. As he stared up at the cliff that seemed entirely sheer and impossibly large, he consoled himself with a trace of bitter, self-deprecating irony that most things except ant hills appeared as big as the Eiffel Tower to him, since he was five feet and eight inches short. (He kept track of this grim statistic in the futile hope that it would show some growth over time, but sadly only shrinking seemed to be in his vertically-impaired future.)

He knew he shouldn't be thinking of climbing the cliff freehand when he was wetter than a drunk who had stumbled into a storm gutter in an abandoned alley, but he was, because he wanted to gobble up obstacles the way a fish did algae. Really, the cliff wasn't so high, and when it came down to it,it was just a big rock. Even if he couldn't see them in the night, there were handholds and footholds. If he fell, he would topple into the lake, which was where he was going to have to dive anyway.

As if spotting Mark's hesitancy, Rob threw down the gauntlet, announcing, "I bet I can beat you to the top."

With that challenge, Rob launched himself at the rock face, grabbing his first handhold and pulling himself up onto the cliff. Mark paused for just a second longer, astounded by how eagerly Rob attacked the stone, and then how he seemed to mold himself against it as he waited for Mark to climb up and join him for a fair start to their next contest.

Scaling the cliff was harder than he had imagined, since handholds that looked firm were insubstantial when he grasped them. The rock became his enemy, and it was difficult to maintain his balance with his damp feet against the slippery stone.

Sweat streamed down his face, soaking into his eyes like tears, and his muscles trembled with the adrenaline of not allowing himself to drip into the lake like a tossed pebble. The competition with Rob became a misty memory as he concentrated on not meeting the doom of his rather unspectacular existence on this craggy island.

Three quarters of the way to the top, he chanced a glance at Rob and discovered they were neck and neck. Rob's cheeks were grimy tangerines coated in a sheen of sweat that shone silver in the moonlight. He smirked, and the smirk spurred Mark on, so that he snatched the next handhold and the next.

Now Rob was behind him, a fading black dot on the cliff reminiscent of a squashed insect, and Mark was almost at the crest. He searched for the next handhold, his face pressed against the rock.

Suddenly, Rob was beside him again, and then he was ahead of Mark, his fingers reaching for the summit. He swung himself up and over, and then sat on the peak, panting like a winded pit bull.

Feeling furious and ashamed that he had been beaten by his worst rival on the team, Mark followed Rob over the crest, and then collapsed beside the fellow forward he was coming to regard as more of an enemy than any filthy Communist spy.

When he glared at Rob, he expected to see triumph in the eyes of his victorious opponent, but he detected only fear, as Rob noted in a voice that was too casual to actually be off-handed, "You know, I thought I saw a lot of rocks in this water that we're supposed to be diving into, which is extremely reassuring."

Images of being a vegetable flicked through Mark's mind like a black and white movie, and he dismissed them by deliberately drawing a veil over the bleak part of his brain that envisioned terrible things. At his core, he was a profoundly physical being, so he thought that he would rather die than be unable to run, jump, skate, or swim again, but his soul, at war with his body as always, screamed that he should cling to any shell of life he could inhabit like a hermit crab, because any life at all was better than none, and there was no guarantee that life continued in any form after death, no matter what the shamans of his ancient people and the missionaries that brought smallpox with their Scripture preached with such zeal.

"Don't worry." Mark forced his face into a careless expression. "It's better to dive in head first than to jump in feet first. I mean, we can always get someone else to do our thinking for us, but the same can't be said for our fucking, and if we can't fuck, we're totally screwed. That's why some hockey players refuse to wear helmets, but every guy remembers to use his jockstrap."

"You're so funny I could rupture a lung laughing." Wrinkling his nose, Rob explored the peak with his eyes, as if seeking some signpost. "I don't see a notice prohibiting diving, so at least our devastated families could probably sue for money to fund our medical expenses if we ended up in comas for the rest of our lives."

Before he had seen the fear in Rob's eyes, Mark might have commented caustically that suing someone else for one's own stupidity was the sort of despicable scheme a lawyer's son would propose, but since he had seen the terror that crouched like a mountain lion behind Rob's words, Mark only said, "Let's dive together on the count of three."

Seeing Rob's tight nod, Mark, decided to put them both out of their misery before they could become any more tense, and burst out, "Three!"

In unison, they dived across the rocks and through the air toward the lake that appeared frighteningly far and cringingly close at the same time. Shouts torn from their lungs to build their adrenaline for the inevitable, impending crash pierced the landscape like sirens and echoed against Mark's eardrums like battle cries.

Smarting pain throbbed in his head as it cut through the water on impact, and he knew he would have an egg-shaped bruise to massage by tomorrow morning. Water that tasted of subterranean plants and fish flooded his mouth as his lips failed to shut around a scream. Relieved to be able to move, he propelled himself to the surface with thrusting arms and legs reminiscent of a frog's rubbery limbs pushing through a rivulet. Hungry for oxygen, he breathed deeply as soon as he emerged from the water and used the air to choke out spasms of laughter that were more about hysteria than happiness.

Beside him, Rob's head stuck out of the lake, wide-eyed with lingering terror but also quaking with spurts of laughter that sounded like more of a release of fear than an explosion of joy.

Finally regaining control of himself, Mark wondered if he and Rob were still rivals and if you could even really still hate someone once you had laughed away fear and screamed away terror together. Perhaps Rob was contemplating the same mystery, since their thoughts appeared to be more in sync than Mark could possibly have imagined before embarking on this dare together.

"You almost beat me to the top, you know." Rob shot Mark a sidelong glance that for once might have indicated grudging respect rather than searing contempt. "We could continue to be intense rivals, but I think it would be more exciting and fun if we were friends."

"Let's be friends," Mark agreed, noting inwardly that Ken would be proud of his peace-making skills this evening. He spoke somberly, because he took friendship seriously, as one of the few constants like gravity that could be relied on when navigating an ever-spinning planet.

As if he couldn't contain himself any longer, Rob rocketed underwater and catapulted away from Mark. A yard away, he peeked his head out again, shaking water out of his hair, the moonlight causing the droplets to shimmer in a dark rainbow.

"Friends forever!" he called to Mark, as if they were second-graders bounding around on a jungle gym. "Deal?"

"Deal," Mark said, as the word forever reverberated inside his eardrums, and he asked himself whether he was developing swimmer's ear.

"Excellent." Rob flashed the first genuine smile he had ever bestowed upon Mark. "Now we've got to come up with a dare for Magic and Morrow, because they've been on the sidelines too long."

"We'd be smarter to bark up other trees," cautioned Mark, "because they're both good boys who could never be tempted into doing anything remotely naughty."

"Nah, don't be taken in by innocent facades." Rob chuckled, as they floated back toward the dock. "They only pretend to be good guys so that nobody suspects them of doing anything wrong when they actually decide to be bad. They'll definitely sneak into Coach Patrick's luggage, steal a piece of underwear, and hang it on the flagpole beneath the Finnish flag—underneath because it's underwear, you see—if we dare them to in a sufficiently grating fashion."

"Holy shit." Mark whistled, not certain where he should feel more admiring or appalled. "How the hell did you come up with such a twisted idea for a dare, huh?"

"My cabin at sleep-away camp once stole our counselor's underpants and hung them under the American flag outside the mess hall as revenge for him whacking our heads one too many times with a flashlight when we exchanged ghost stories after lights-out," Rob explained in a smug tone that implied he had just won a prestigious award. "We got to discover if our counselor was a briefs or boxers guy. It was a very educational summer activity."

"Was the camp counselor a briefs or a boxers guy?" pressed Mark, arching an eyebrow. "You can't end the story there without sharing the most important part."

"Briefs." Rob snickered. "Very short Jockey briefs to be precise."

"Good thing he didn't like to go commando," Mark commented, his face splitting with a mischievous grin.

"Indeed." Rob's eyes sparkled like the stars overhead. "There were enough bucks roaming the woods at camp."

Mark burst out laughing, and it was as if the lake was a private paradise where they could determine the currents of their own fates, and Rob, a fleet and unstoppable water creature, wasn't the pampered prince he had been less than an hour ago. He seemed less remote like the God in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and more akin to the tragically human Adam desperately stretching fingers toward pristine clouds and forever knowing heaven would slip through his fingers like vapor even if he managed to clasp it.

It occurred to Mark with all the abrupt inertia of a derailed train that maybe Rob had meshed so well with Johnson because the Wisconsin native listened to Rob as nobody else on the team did—the way Ken listened to Mark's incoherent, raging rambles. Mark had always been so vexed when Rob opened his big mouth to expound upon whatever bee was humming around in his upper-crust bonnet because Rob's know-it-all attitude was the auditory equivalent of sand chucked into the eyeball at a hundred miles per hour that he hadn't ever paused to consider that Rob might have been so sharp and snide since he was afraid he wouldn't be heard if he spoke more softly. In the blackness enveloping the lake, Mark vowed to give him that opportunity to be heard from now on no matter how torturous on his scant supplies of patience it was to listen.

Abruptly, Mark wished they could return to the craggy island where they weren't scared to grow close to one another like twin trees in a forest. Amid the infertile rocky outcroppings, their friendship could take root and bloom like a cactus in the desert outside Phoenix. They could tell dirty jokes, laugh and shout, and share their hopes and fears. There would be no one around to stifle them, or to tell them what they thought or did was wrong. On the island, they wouldn't be free because they could do what they wanted. No, they would be liberated in a more primeval way since they would be allowed to really want at all.


	6. Chapter 6

"_We know that hockey is where we live, where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games."—__**Fred Shero**_

Epilogue: Time Between Games

Mark stared out the window of the Oslo hotel room he shared with Ken, who had gone out to the corner grocery store to purchase a six pack of Carlsberg-Ringes beer and raisin bolle with brown cheese because Mark had said that the best cure for the hairline fracture his ankle had suffered during the afternoon's training run with Coach Patrick was alcohol and hangover food.

Gazing out at the luminous pinpricks of the stars, Mark tried not to see, as if from light-years away, his own foot step into a hole—more like a crater you would expect to find on the leering face of the moon than in a thriving Norwegian city—and twist. He had known when he felt more than heard that sickening snap in his ankle that his Olympic dream might have been shattered, so when Doc diagnosed after an X-Ray a hairline fracture in his ankle that would take anywhere from six to eight weeks to heal, he hadn't listened to Coach Patrick's bracing assurances that injuries happened to everyone—even the greatest players in the NHL weren't immune to them.

No matter what soothing words Coach Patrick had spewed, Mark had recognized that his injury made his spot on the roster even more tenuous than it already was and gave opportunities to other players who would take his ice time to surpass him on Herb Brooks' list of Olympic hopefuls. As long as he was injured, Mark understood that he was vulnerable in more places than just his fractured ankle. His body had failed him in a freak accident during his push for the Olympics, he might never forgive it for betraying him as if it like Herb didn't want him on te team, and now he felt as if the sun had flickered out.

A knock sounded on the ajar door, and Mark called dully, "Come in!"

Rob slid into the room and settled on the bed beside Mark. Not ready to hear whatever awkward sympathy Rob planned to offer, Mark commented, still studying the dark sky outside the window, "Everything ends, you know. Even stars burn out, and, because the universe is expanding, it keeps getting colder. The stars we see shining so brightly right now could already have been dead for a century, and nobody would realize until a hundred years from now."

"Particles from dead stars make new stars and planets," Rob answered, fingers tugging on a loose thread in Mark's blanket. "When the universe expands far enough, it will contract again, and then there will be another Big Bang. Every ending has a beginning wrapped into it like crème in the middle of an Oreo."

Somehow they didn't seem to be talking about astronomy anymore, but, reluctant to surrender the façade, Mark muttered, "Do you ever think about how lucky we are to even be here—any of us? I mean, for us to even exist, everything from our planet's magnetic field to its distance from the sun had to be perfectly aligned to support life. Hell, if we didn't have a moon as big as ours—a moon that a little planet like ours isn't even supposed to have—to stabilize our axis and slow our rotation with its massive gravitational pull, our planet would be subject to the same sort of temperature fluctuations that make Mars a barren wasteland. That we're even here is a matter of chance and luck."

"Yeah, and it took Earth colliding with a planet the size of Mars to give us our moon," observed Rob in a hushed tone. "The moon is just coalesced debris from Earth and that ancient planet that were thrown into the atmosphere from the crash. You need a cataclysm to create and sustain life."

Mark bit his lip hard enough to taste the coppery tang of blood, wondering if his fractured ankle would truly be the death knell of his hopes of going to Lake Placid or if it was only the beginning of a comeback story of survival against the odds. Either way, he supposed that at least he had memories of friendships he hadn't though he would be able to develop to carry with him to the grave like pictures, a melancholy idea that prompted him to ask, "Do you think when a guy dies, if he sincerely repents of whatever crap he did wrong, he gets to go back and live forever in all the times that were happiest for him?"

Rob paused, contemplating this question, and then answered, "My dad insists the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. My preacher says hell is basically a state of reliving all the horrible shit you did and being unable to fix any of it. By that logic, heaven, as the opposite of hell, should be a divine, timeless place where you could experience everything pleasant that you ever did and not have any of it change. Everything is about repetition and constancy, so Herbies might be the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe, after all."

"Herb will be thrilled." Mark chuckled, and then remembering how it had felt to swim through the lake with water so cool and pure that his mouth seemed to be cut open every time a drop touched his tongue and how it had felt to joke, laugh, and compete with Rob, he added softly, "If I get a chance to relive my life, swimming to that cliff and back with you is one of the moments I'd choose to revisit."

"Me too." Rob grinned wryly. "Since I know I actually make it back, I can classify it as a good memory."

"I don't know whether I'll be able to make it back from my injury in time for the Olympics." Rubbing an earlobe between his fingers, Mark discovered that he was ready to discuss his fractured ankle at last.

"September to February is a long time to rehabilitate from an injury." Rob reached out to clap Mark on the shoulder. "You'll be fine, Wellsy. Just don't—"

"Don't _what_?" pressed Mark, his forehead knitting, when Rob trailed off in the middle of dispensing advice.

"Just don't let Herb bully you into coming back too soon—give it the full eight weeks to recover if you have to," Rob finished fiercely as if the question was all he needed to burst out with this vehement declaration. "Don't risk aggravating the injury. That's stupid, and any coach who tries to coerce you into playing when you could worsen an injury is scum, okay?"

"Yep." Mark nodded, and proceeded to point out with a distinct note of fatalism that would not have been out of place in the voice of a death row inmate, "It's just that my fractured ankle doesn't exactly increase my thin odds of making the final cut for the roster. That's the truth. In Chippewa myths and the books teachers force-fed us in English class, the truth makes everything all right in the end. The heroes prevail, while the villains are punished, and, in a nutshell, there is happiness and justice, but in real life, it isn't like that, is it? In real life, you don't always know who the heroes are, and even if you could identify them all, you couldn't guarantee a good ending for them all, could you?"

"No." Rob exhaled gustily. "In real life, I figure the truth only makes everything known, and we only bother with it at all because nobody has enough deception skills to maintain an illusion forever."

For a long while after that, they just sat and said nothing. Neither of them attempted to share a joke or talk about what had happened or what was yet to come. They simply sat with their backs to the pillows and their shoulder grazing one another. It was the lightest of touches, but it was enough to remind Mark that he had friends on a lonely, rough journey that he hoped led to Lake Placid, and that sometimes his place wasn't somewhere he found but instead was somewhere that found him when he needed it most.


End file.
